Next Generation Internet Investments

The Next Generation Internet is ripe for introducing faster technologies and greater capacities that will make our lives more entertaining and the Internet more addictive than it is now. Imagine the whole entire population of China, Video calling their friends all at the same time and experiencing no degradation in the bandwidth or service.

Imagine downloading all the movies ever made in the world, in just under four minutes. That's the future, when Cisco fully implements its Carrier Routing System, CRS-3 Routers, which have immense more capacity than previous routers. This is the vision of Cisco's CEO, John T. Chambers and the unrealized dreams of billions of people who seek to make the Internet more accessible and more affordable, while at the same time, increasing its capacity for the Internet's Next Generation and its world of all things video.

It's just a matter of fully implementing the CRS-3 Carrier Routing System worldwide and the benefits will be phenomenal. Internet users will demand it and gamers will obssess over it. Video Aficionados will demand the increase capacity and will ignite the demand for the CRS-3 Routers. Cisco is in a prime position to take advantage of this explosive growth of video online and will carve out a nice niche for itself by dominating this aspect of the Next Generation Internet's infrastructure.

The question that has yet to be answered of course is, how does this affect what Google is doing and to what extent may Google compete with Cisco in this specialized hardware space? No matter how the competition heats up, there will be winners and there will be losers, and overall, there is an opportunity to make profits on all of them.

Video will continue to influence the direction of the Internet and the online surfers will flock to what they consider to be the best applications the Internet has to offer. Remember people on the Internet tend to go where their friends go, to communicate, to collaborate and to share ideas and experiences and guess what? Where do the search engines robots go? Yep, wherever folks are congregating and interacting online, the search engines follow.

As more and more Internet users come online to take advantage of the many experiences that video offers, so too will the search engines be there to categorize, list, compile and archive all that is going on, hoping to influence the purchasing decisions of those users with their ads and other items.

So, where should you put your money? My money is on the suppliers of the infrastructure for the hardware, such as Cisco and Xilinx, because Xilinx, is a worldwide leader of programmable logic and programmable system solutions. My money is on the suppliers of the video technology and standard that is likely to prevail over the current standard which is Adobe's Flash. Remember the off-line video battle between "Betamax" and "VHS?" We all know who won and we all know that neither "Betamax" or "VHS," is as exciting as "BluRay."

Do your due diligence and look at the dominant players for each hardware and/or software standard and when you're comfortable, get with your investment advisor to choose which if, any you are comfortable with. A change is coming for the Internet and there will profits to be had, by those sharp enough, or interested enough to do their homework.

P.S., In the interest of full disclosure, I am not an investment advisor, nor do I play one on television or online. I at the time of this writing, hold no shares in Cisco or Xilinx.