Juniper Networks revealed its newest core router today after months of industry speculation.

The new T1600 has a throughput capacity of 1.6 terabits per second in a half-rack chassis, with 100 Gb/s line cards that each include two 50-Gb/s chips.

Generally available in this year’s fourth quarter, the T1600 will compete directly with the CRS-1 router Cisco Systems introduced three years ago. Last month Cisco, which leads the core router market, reported nearly $250 million in orders for the CRS-1 during the company’s most recent quarter alone.

Juniper is quick to point out that the T1600’s 1.6 Tb/s half-rack capacity represents a 150% boost over the CRS-1’s 640 Gb/s. And unlike the CRS-1, Juniper said, the T1600 doesn’t require reinforced flooring or additional power and cooling.

“We’re leapfrogging in terms of capacity,” said Shailesh Shukla, Juniper’s vice president of service provider marketing and partnerships. “But it’s not just about [being] fast. It’s also about intelligence and smartness.”

The new product runs on Juniper’s Junos operating system and includes its features, such as policy management and the session and resource control functions the vendor announced in March.

“Now you can build an end-to-end network from the [customer premises equipment] to the edge to the core and manage it all from a policy standpoint--create policies for [traffic] flows, applications or subscribers, and implement them across the network,” Shukla said. “It’s no longer the dumb core of the past. It’s the intelligent core of the future.”

Customers of Juniper’s previous core router, the five-year-old T640, can upgrade to the T1600 in a 90-minute procedure that does not interrupt service, Juniper said, because the gear includes enough redundant parts that can be replaced one at a time.

The new product introduction comes as another core router vendor, Avici Systems, recently announced an exit from the space this year in favor of a software control plane business. “It’s a two-horse race,” Shukla said of the core router business.