<P>The high-performance Cisco 7500 Series Router remains the market leader due to its breadth of advanced support for LAN/WAN services, redundancy, reliability, and performance. A distributed architecture using Versatile Interface Processors (VIPs) is the key to the Cisco 7500s scalability. Each VIP has its own processor, which is capable of switching IP data packets and providing network services. This scenario allows the overall system performance of Cisco 7500 routers to scale up when they need to handle more high-speed network connections and more data packets. The RSP is still the master of the system. It runs routing protocols with other routers in the network to gather switching intelligence, which is then downloaded to the VIPs so that each can switch IP packets on its own. </P>