History of the Cisco 7200
The Cisco 7200 Series routers have been at the Enterprise Edge for almost two decades. Even though the first 7200 Series router came out in 1996. Cisco has kept the 7200 Series routers up to date by releasing a new chassis (The 7200VXR in 2002) and continuing to release new Network Processing Engines (NPEs).
The current NPE-G2 processor (released in 2006) for the 7200VXR Series offers forwarding rates up to 2Mpps, 1.8 Gigabits backplane fabric bandwidth and a maximum of one million routes in the forwarding table. The 7200VXR Series with the NEP-G2 is acceptable for links with up to 500Mbps of traffic.