In a competitive market with growing demand for bandwidth and services, service providers need to improve their profitability by increasing revenue through scaling their networks and service offerings while controlling and reducing costs. The Cisco 12000 Series offers an advanced networking solution to this challenge. Its unique distributed architecture supports transparent system and service scalability while maintaining performance and reducing the cost and complexity of today's multiservice networks.The Cisco 12006 Router, a member of the Cisco 12000 Series, features a 6-slot chassis and a switch fabric that supports 2.5-Gbps (full-duplex) throughput per line card slot with a future growth option to 10 Gbps. Based on the architecture of the widely deployed Cisco 12000 Series, the Cisco 12006 Router supports distributed packet forwarding with a crossbar matrix switch that enables all 2.5-Gbps interfaces with an upgrade path to support 10-Gbps line cards. The software upgrade process is performed with zero downtime.The Cisco 12000 Series delivers innovative virtual-output-queuing (VOQ) technology (which prevents head-of-line blocking), an enhanced clock scheduler, and specialized high-speed application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs). Additionally, the Cisco 12000 Series switch fabric offers unmatched carrier-class performance and reliability that provide priority packet delivery and true 2.5-Gbps line-rate performance in a fully loaded system.