The increased popularity of the Internet as an electronic agent for commerce, entertainment, communication, and information retrieval is causing IP traffic to double every six months. This exponential growth in IP traffic is driving service providers to upgrade their network infrastructure and engineer their Points-of-Presence (POPs) with higher performance and scalable Layer 3 switches and routers. Cisco offers the Gigabit Ethernet (GE) line card for the GSR 12000 series of routers to address the need to interconnect devices within POP at high data rates.This low-cost solution is also compelling for Internet service providers (ISPs) with large server farms who are looking for low-cost links between the servers and the POPs GSRs. The GE line card is the first Ethernet-based product for the GSR 12000 series, providing a cost-effective, high bandwidth solution between co-located GSRs or between GSRs and IP-related equipment such as edge routers, gigabit Ethernet switches, or network servers.