On Tuesday morning, as most of us in Silicon Valley ate breakfast, the Internet changed. The shift happened so quickly that it felt both jarring and stupendous at the same time.

O.K., the Internet didn’t really change in any discernible way. Rather, Cisco released a new router – sorry, make that a new routing system – called the CRS-3 that the company has spent weeks hyping as the gateway to a new era of Internet wonders, that it “will forever change the Internet.”

(Even my dad, who has zero interest in networking, heard about this and wanted to know what Cisco had in store.)

During an online news conference, John Chambers, Cisco’s chief executive, hailed the CRS-3 as key to handling the explosive growth in online video and other large data streams in the years to come.

According to Cisco, the CRS-3 could deliver up digital copies of all the movies ever made in about 4 minutes. Measured another way, the system could facilitate a video call with every person in China at the same time.

Such networking feats clearly designate the CRS-3 as a product meant for carriers and large service providers, handling monster amounts of data traffic.

“It is all about bringing all these dreams and aspirations to life,” Mr. Chambers said.

The man knows how to spice up a routing system.

The product, which is still in field trials, can handle three times as much data as its predecessor the CRS-1, Cisco says. All told, we’re talking about a machine that capable of 322 terabits per second.

Cisco has a real thing for the big sell around these big routers.

In 2004, it brought out the CRS-1 and billed it as the final bridge from the analog to the digital age and called the product the “foundation for the future of communications.”

Cisco has since sold about 5,000 of the systems to 300 customers.

Mr. Chambers argued that people had underestimated the need for the CRS-1 when it was first announced. But rising network demand created a large market for the product.

This time around, Mr. Chambers expects video, mobile data and collaboration software to drive demand for even greater network capacity.

Mr. Chambers said that the CRS-3 has about 12 times the capacity of rival hardware. He declined to put a name on that rival gear, but you would expect he was going after products from Juniper. A spokesman for Juniper said the company was working on a response to these claims.

Nikos Theodosopoulos, an analyst at UBS, wrote in a research note that this type of routing product accounts for only about 4 percent of Cisco’s total revenue. Both Cisco and Juniper have lost share in this market to China’s Huawei over the past six years.

Keith Cambron, the head of AT&T Labs, joined Mr. Chambers for the online news conference and spoke highly of the CRS-3’s performance during tests.

Many of you will no doubt be pleased to know that AT&T is aware of this product and apparently interested in buying it, since the company has real struggles handling its current network traffic.