Investors in networking equipment firm Brocade are pinning their hopes on its plans to launch a high end router next month, hoping this will improve its performance with carriers and drive new life into its financial performance. Announcing its third quarter results last week, Brocade said it would announce a new router in mid-September, targeted at dense 100Gbps deployments for service providers and large enterprises, sectors where it has been struggling against Cisco. The firm’s carrier router sales have been flat for the past three quarters, a trend which it blamed first on a major customer slowing its network spending, and then on many clients choosing to wait until the new router arrives. It will therefore be important that the…