Blame iPhone and Stevenote for my Monday long loss of reality, which made me totally overlook Juniper’s (JNPR) announcement about their new router, T-1600, the very same one, that is supposed to compete with Cisco’s uber router, CRS-1. This was a router Juniper was developing in stealth-mode, and no one expected the company to announce it this soon.

But they did, and issued a complex press release that included the requisite buzzwords like video and IPTV to justify why it was releasing the new router. While the router won’t impact revenues until the end of 2007, it will give Juniper a big morale boost (and a talking point.)

The company claims that T-1600 is one honking piece of iron, and has twice the density of competitive platforms (read 
CSCO’s CRS-1) and delivers 1.6Tbps of throughput per chassis. (Light Reading report has all the arcane details that should keep the router groupies happy.) Whatever it does, one thing is for sure, UBS Research analyst Nikos Theodosopoulos is right when he says that this baby is to help Juniper “regain lost market share & enhance positioning in next-gen RFPs.”

This service provider router market is on an upswing, according to The Dell O’ro Group. In the first quarter of 2007, the worldwide service provider router market grew 29 percent in the first quarter of 2007 compared to the same period last year, the research group says. Juniper sales were up 6% while Cisco saw its router sales to service providers jump 26%.