Cisco Systems on March 9 unveiled super-fast Internet hardware that promises to boost U.S. competitiveness and bolster economic recovery by moving mountains of data at astounding speeds.

The leader in networking equipment said its new router "triples the capacity of its predecessor," and "enables the entire printed collection of the Library of Congress to be downloaded in just over one second."

The system also would enable "every man, woman and child in China to make a video call, simultaneously; and every motion picture ever created to be streamed in less than four minutes," Cisco said.

The new Cisco hardware is for the backbones of telecom firms and other Internet service providers that will be able to vastly ramp up the amount of data they handle and how fast it travels.

"They are the plumbers of the Internet," analyst Rob Enderle of Enderle Group in Silicon Valley said of Cisco. "They are the ones that make sure that the pipes are clean and large enough to handle the flow of traffic and remain up and running."

AT&T indicated that it will begin deploying the new-generation Cisco switching and router hardware in the U.S. in about two years.

The company has found itself "bandwidth constrained" as people's lives increasingly revolve around the Internet and accessing rich content such as digital movies, videos and television shows.

Cisco chief executive John Chambers called digital video "the new killer app" and said that most gadgets connecting to the Internet are evolving to handle demand for such content.

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