It's one thing to have a routing platform that can scale to high capacity -- it's quite another to actually have products that can actually deliver on the promise of that scale.

Cisco (NASDAQ:CSCO) today is rolling out its highest-density 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10 GbE) line card, sporting a total of sixteen 10 GbE ports that together deliver a whopping 160 Gbps of throughput bandwidth.

The new line card is for Cisco's ASR (Aggregation Services Router) 9000 platform, which debuted in Nov. 2008. The new 16x10GbE card effectively doubles the capacity that Cisco had previously offered to ASR 9000 customers.