The Cisco ASR 1000 Series consists of six different versions, the Cisco ASR 1001 Router, the Cisco ASR 1002 Fixed Router, the Cisco ASR 1002 Router, the Cisco ASR 1004 Router, the Cisco ASR 1006 Router, and the Cisco ASR 1013 Router. All six models use the innovative and powerful Cisco QuantumFlow Processor, which provides a huge leap in performance and resiliency for network processors.

The Cisco ASR 1000 Series provides a significant enhanced value compared to prior generations of Cisco midrange routing solutions by providing more than tenfold performance improvement with services running. Additionally, the routers have hardware and software redundancy, as well as an industry-leading high-availability design.

The Cisco ASR 1000 Series delivers multiple services embedded in the Cisco QuantumFlow Processor at wire speeds from 2.5 Gbps up to 40 Gbps. The services supported on the Cisco QuantumFlow Processor include security services (for example, encryption and firewall), quality of service (QoS), Network Based Application Recognition (NBAR), Cisco IOS® Flexible Packet Matching (FPM), broadband aggregation, and Cisco Unified Border Element (SP Edition) (formerly called Session Border Control, or SBC), among others.

With the separation of the control and data planes in the Cisco ASR 1000 Series Router architecture, software redundancy (on the Cisco ASR 1001, ASR 1002 Fixed, ASR 1002, and ASR 1004 Routers) and hardware redundancy (on the Cisco ASR 1006 and ASR 1013 Routers) are provided. Additionally, the modular Cisco IOS XE Software that is introduced with the Cisco ASR 1000 Series facilitates In-Service Software Upgrade (ISSU).