Cisco's announcement is one of dozens being made at Interop by networking vendors, many of which plan to boost the performance or security of existing technologies. For example, Citrix Systems Inc. intends to unveil the NetScaler 12000, a high-end addition to its line of application acceleration appliances.

The products that Cisco is adding include a processing engine called the NPE-G2, which doubles the 7200's routing performance to 2 million packets per second, said Stefan Dyckerhoff, the company's director of midrange routing.

Cisco also intends to announce a virtual private network services adapter and a device that lets users add a seventh port adapter to their routers. Dyckerhoff said the VPN adapter, together with the NPE-G2 engine, could triple the throughput of the 7200s, which are widely used as WAN aggregation routers.

Wachovia Corp. will install the NPE-G2 on 120 existing 7200s when the new processor becomes available this month, said John Burns, vice president of network services at the Charlotte, N.C.-based financial services firm. Because he can use the 7200 chassis he already has in place, Burns said he expects to save "at least several million dollars over moving to a new platform."

Burns beta-tested the NPE-G2 from December to March and found that it can support a mix of voice-over-IP and data traffic with full quality-of- service capabilities -- something that the 7200's current processing engine can't handle. He said he will also use the new engine's added capacity to support data encryption on Wachovia's networks.