China is quietly pushing ahead with massive 50,000Mbps broadband rollout to leapfrog rest of the world on internet speeds
China is quietly pushing ahead with massive 50,000Mbps broadband rollout to leapfrog rest of the world on internet speeds
cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/54702508
China is quietly pushing ahead with massive 50,000Mbps broadband rollout to leapfrog rest of the world on internet speeds
China is quietly pushing ahead with massive 50,000Mbps broadband rollout to leapfrog rest of the world on internet speeds
Written in Switzerland from my 25GBps symmetric connection (for like 60$/month) that I have for a couple of years 🤷♂️
Also for personal use the difference between 1Gbps and 25 (or, I guess, 100GBps) is essentially zero… your everyday connection is via WiFi (good luck to get more than 1GBps there) or on a home server/NAS/workstation where likely you run batch jobs where the difference between 1 minute or 5 minutes is not a huge deal (and yes I am not saying 1 vs 25 because at that speed generally the bottleneck is the place where you are getting data from)
Seconding this, while I have the option for multi-gig at my address, I don't have the need, once you get around gigabit upload speeds life is fine.
I can upload hours of uncompressed gameplay to YouTube in under an hour, and that's limited mostly by their ingest speeds (≈300Mbps) and not my end, so that's plenty.
With all that said, the option for consumers is great, I'm thankful I have that choice, wish more people had it too.
I have a 40Mbps down, 5Mbps up connection for $30. Consider yourself as real lucky.
Yeah, I was on that until the other week, when my area finally got upgraded to 1Gbps.
It's nice for big downloads (and with game sizes what they are now, that bit is a big difference), but for regular use? Not really a vast change. It's nice that your bandwidth doesn't suddenly vanish when one of your unattended devices decides to wake up and download a 20GB update for a game you haven't played in months I guess.
I do 🙂
lol I have 3Mbps down .5 up for 40$
I have symmetrical 10 Gbps at home ($30/mo) and I'll agree. When it's nice when you have big updates, for most households 1 Gbps is going to be just fine. As you say, the vast majority of users are bottlenecked by Wi-Fi.
The bigger crime are all the asymmetrical connections that people on technologies like Cable TV networks have, where you get 1-2 Gbps down but only something tiny like 50 Mbps up. This results in crappy video calls, makes off-site/remote backups unfeasible, means you can't host anything at home, etc.
you get 1-2 Gbps down but only something tiny like 50 Mbps up
That's exactly what you get in Australia, even if you have FTTP, 95% of ISPs only offer up to 1000/50Mbps, and that's if you live in the big cities. Mine costs ~US$70/mo btw. And they have a 'typical evening speed' that drops to 860/42Mbps (I've never heard of such a concept outside Australia. Yeah, totally not a scam).
A handful ISPs offer 1000/400Mbps and you'll be looking at ~US$125/mo. Anything faster you'll be handed with astronomical commercial bills.
Do you actually have 10G switches and network cards, or is everything behind your router on 1G?
Interesting--when I made a similar argument on Reddit some years ago, networking geniuses assured me that they needed more than 1Gbps to play lag-free games. This on /r/programming, no less.
Hi from Canada. 1.5 Gbps for $66 a month plus cellphone plan of $50 🤦🏼
data drive arrays are so fucking slow
I swear to god! half of my job at work is waiting for the platter drives to give the data to the solid state arrays on the other side of a fiber connection
Also doesn't help that SMB is single threaded. Completely mismatched for the era of multicore processors and SSDs.
Plus what consumer can even support higher bandwidth? Computers are starting to come with 2.5G Ethernet, switches are coming down in price but still pretty expensive for home use (and complex), and any existing wiring is likely close to topped out.
For anything faster, you’re all too likely to need enterprise equipment for a lot more money and a lot more complexity.
I’ve briefly considered updating to faster internet but
I'm sure I have the same ISP as you, but so far I didn't splurge to buy 10G or 25G gear.
If you don't mind telling, what router and switches did you go for?
Or did you go the Michael Stapelberg route?
Kinda, yeah. Gaming workstation + Network card (and optics) from fs.com + Nixos.
This setup has the benefit that my workstation has also all possible bandwidth. Services run in nixos containers (that are awesome!) for isolation from the routing.
Not to mention the server is the bottleneck at that point. I have access to 2.5Gb/2.5Gb but only pay for 500/500 because, even that is faster than most servers, and of course all the mobile devices aren’t pushing more than 400 on WiFi.
There's a bunch of places in the US that has 10 Gbps speed, so this jump to 50 Gbps is not too shocking. Writing it as 50,000 Mbps to make it seem huge is an interesting take.
It's so incredibly annoying when people use smaller order of magnitude descriptors simply so they can then write more zeros. A good chunk of the time too it feels like it's done to distract from a different point or to exaggerate without technically lying.
Doesn't help that technical jargon is only best used when communicating with someone in that field or understands it. Big number + alphabet soup always seems scary 😞
I’m just pretty sure my fiber vendor offers 10Gbps service but I’ve never had reason to check whether they offer it here. There app is not responding so I can’t verify …. They are better at fiber service than maintaining an app.
Personally I think gig fiber is the current sweet spot:
It’s technically overkill for most people but a huge benefit is it works. For everything. Cable tends to be way over-provisioned for plus asymmetrical and higher latency, so you won’t get the bandwidth you pay for, uploads will be slow, and latency may hit you while gaming or streaming. Most of the time cable or slower fiber will be good enough but you will hit glitches, buffering. My gigabit fiber has been rock solid for years, never a glitch, never a buffering, no slow uploads, never impacts gaming. It’s near perfect. I dont mind the extra cost due to the huge savings from dropping cable and phone
It will be in 10 years when a majority of their country has access to it. Industrialization in China is on a different level.
In less than 25 years they will take the top spot for global economy, and likely everything else.
Yep, and in ten years, we’ll still be arguing about whether dsl counts as “broadband”
China will be lucky if they still exist as a single unified nation. Demographics, employment, debt, over built property market, over dependence on manufacturing exports, energy import dependence, food import dependence.
They have a number of very strong headwinds that could very well cause the failure and break up of the CCP in the next twenty years.
Worse than that, from the article:
The 50G-PON ITU-T standard supports theoretical speeds of up to 50 Gbps downstream and up to 25 Gbps upstream, though current real-world deployments in China - led by China Telecom, its regional branch Shanghai Telecom, and ZTE - typically provide 10 Gbps all-optical access.
So the 50G number is just theoretical and actual real world speed is only 10G. Due to regulations in the US, advertisements would need to advertise the real speeds. So this is really just the same as 10Gbps anywhere else.
Man, real countries are doing this shit while the US is doing an illegal war on the thought crime of being"woke".
China has this covered hands down. If you say Winnie, two mean looking Chinese men appear behind you.
Horses are fucked in China. They winnie all the time.
Yeah, one thing at a time
/s
Not just this, I'm not sure if they checked about LGBT rights in China.
From outside the first world Trump and his supporters look scandalist, loud, corrupt and incompetent. Which is sad. But they don't seem fascist most of the time.
Anyway, if we take Putin, he's done many things, one thing he's consistently never done is say antisemitic or easily recognizable fascist things. There is some popularity of Ivan Ilyin around him, who is a Russian emigrant fascist philosopher, though (who apparently wanted to fix problems with Mussolini and the own such "thinkers" of the White movement, except he was on the dumber side, so compared to his writings Mein Kampf seems intellectually elegant).
AT&T still hasn't installed fiber in my old neighborhood where one of their lines cuts straight through a row of houses that conveniently do get fiber, while everyone else is stuck on cable.
Did I mention they received billions in federal funding to upgrade everyone?
We're testing this same tech in the UK as well: https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2025/02/openreach-and-nokia-claim-uks-first-live-test-of-50gbps-broadband.html
China might be a little ahead but it's hardly a leapfrog.
I live in London and my speed is 64-69Mb, only two choices of BT/Openreach or Virgin Media where I live sadly. I have thought about switching to VM as they seem more stable where I live now, I do check other fibre options like Community Fibre, Hyperoptics and YouFibre regularly to see 8f in my area, sadly not yet :o(
We already have private 100gbps in Australia and our public network just trialled it last year so rollout is expected this year there as well.
Why is anyone celebrating 50gbps? I can’t imagine Australia is anywhere near leading here.
Come on mate, internet in Australia is pretty shit after the NBN fiasco. Let me know when any of those those 100gbps lines reach 1gbps xD.
This is for PON technology. 1 fibre can be split 32-ways to feed, you guessed it, 32 customers. 50g over a fibre that is split 32-ways with a minimum of 15db loss is impressive.
I guarantee those 100gbps circuits are a single fibre all the way from the provider to the customer. And they are expensive, very expensive.
I wonder if they use semiconductor optical amplifiers in the receivers, or if they can make do with avalanche photodiodes.
The 100G stuff I'm looking at has 18.5 dB budget with APDs, that seems rough considering you want a few kilometers of fiber, a few splices and a few connectors (probably LC/APC) as well.
This would be for a business, surely? I can't imagine any individual having a use case for those speeds.
I can get 8 gigabit symmetrical if I want to, but I don't.
Meanwhile, Telia in Estonia: "The Estonian customer doesn't prioritize connection speed or price, that's why we don't need to offer competitive speed/price ratios compared to what we have in other European countries"
Seems surprising, especially because Estonia is known for its digitized government. I logically thought that it'd be complemented with decent Internet coverage.
We have roughly the same problem that the US has, where they've paid the big ISPs to put fiber everywhere and all that money got pocketed. Well, Estonia's first few big fiber projects were all through Telia. Telia put down way less fiber than promised and constantly kept saying the lines were already all committed so they couldn't rent it out to competitors.
This I believe started before we even had Telia here - We had Eesti Telekom, later known as Elion, and then finally it was acquired by Telia. The same company has had a semi-monopolistic status pretty much all the time. Tele2 and Elisa exist, but they've never had the sweet ass contracts Telia's always had.
This is slowly starting to change with the currently ongoing broadband project where you can get an ISP-neutral fiber connection installed for like 99€ or 199€, regardless of how much work it is to get the lines to you, but I'm not sure this is even available if you've already got Telia's monopoly fiber installed. It's very slow to roll out and every year or 2 they choose a bunch of municipalities with problematic Internet access and then if you live in one of those, you can apply. This has been a godsend, because it got me fiber at home, after years of only being able to get 12/1 mbps through Telia copper.
So 50Gbps internet.
I would rather have 50,000,000,000bps
Bigger Number = Better
The math is mathing correctly
Git outta here with that thar metric mumbo jumbo!
Why do I care? Why it need to be so fast?
What is everyone doing with their internet that I'm apparently missing out on?
Decades ago....
"Why do I need electricity? I have candles. Lights seem excessive."
Yes, but once most people have electricity, new products will be designed to take advantage of it. Now you can have a washing machine, for example.
Broadband is the same. Once most of your population has high bandwidth, we can start to design things that will use it. Right now we're still designing for DSL speeds.
That's entirely speculative. There are diminishing returns. Unless you're going to host your own YouTube, the use case for 50Gbps connections to the home is quite small. 4K video streaming at Ultra HD Blu-ray bitrates doesn't even come close to saturating 1Gbps, and all streaming services compress 4K video significantly more than what Ultra HD Blu-ray offers. The server side is the limit, not home connections.
Now, if you want to talk about self-hosting stuff and returning the Internet to a more peer-to-peer architecture, then you need IPv6. Having any kind of NAT in the way is not going to work. Connection speed still isn't that important.
Yes but have you considered China bad?
So I'm just going to be a completely different person once I have access to these speeds or you are suggesting new tech that will be made available to consumers?
360 VR experience with 16K resolution, highly textured touchable surfaces, and smell-o-vision. Only a $40 Meta subscription with ads.
Latency is much more critical than bandwidth for any sort of real-time VR.
. Only a $40 Meta subscriptio
I tried to upload some 8k 360 footage to FB before I left it "We're sorry, but an error has occurred"
Tried over several days, no good. tried again a month later, still no good.
Camera is more or less useless if you can't host the footage anyway :/
It's not fast it's more of more bandwidth, means more people can be connected from one line. Speed will remain the same.
For me, the normal stuff. Mathematically my gig fiber is overkill for my usage. And internet services can rarely keep up with that - you want to download some update or new game? It’s throttled at the source regardless of your internet connection
But in reality when I visit people with “fast enough” internet, I always see glitches and buffering and lag. While it usually serves the need and sometimes gets advertised bandwidth, gig fiber always serves the need. I shouldn’t have to complain about my network or worry about how many streams or how big a download or how many people on their phones. I should never worry about lag during games or interrupted video calls. And I shouldn’t have to worry about sketchy broadband providers (like xFinity/ConCast) way over provisioning their lines or otherwise never delivering marketed bandwidth.
Gig fiber delivers. Always. Like any good infrastructure you don’t even have to think about it: it just always does the job
But computers are getting faster - it seems like even medium level laptops are coming with 2.5Ge, and everything is more and more digital, and we expect more all the time. Yes I do expect to want a faster connection within 5-10 years even without doing anything high bandwidth. Heck, if history holds, another couple upgrades of JavaScript and we’ll need 50G to load web pages
640kb should be enough for anybody.
While us taxpayer and ISP consumer is getting fuck all for their taxes and fees
Parasites just looting.
Chinese infrastructure developing is truly impressive. I guess that's one benefit of being in an imperial dictatorship.
It feels like they are using this presidency to get as far ahead as they can.
Not just this one. But I think you are overestimating such improvements over strategic ones that the US is still doing more. Say, Starlink really turning into some sort of planetary cell network.
They are ostensibly a one party state, not a dictatorship. While Xi is the paramount leader, he claims he isn't a dictator and I definitely believe him. Also it seems like he doesn't have absolute control, but what do I know.
Very cool and they should keep doing this, but no one’s CPE is going to be able to do anywhere near this speed unless they plan on giving everyone large enterprises routers for home use.
But it's not like the Chinese government to provide that kind of service out of kindness.
Big Brother needs bandwidth to watch you in 4K.
They’re just building out an infrastructure to modern standards rather than half-ass it and have to come back later. You could argue that this is a long term investment where they are saving money by starting with the latest hardware
Wish we could do that. But now that I think about it, it's much better to improve things in small steps that can be monetized with ever increasing prices for each step. Yeah, that's definitely the better way to do it.
Is China leading the world in green energy research and production an evil plot too?
I get it dictators are shit and we should kill them, but having a society where people's needs are met makes society easier to control. It's literally good for the CCP to make people's lives better so they don't get hung.
'quietly'
Well, at least they're doing it quietly.
BRB moving to China
KC starts the beta for 50gig next month.
High speed internet behind the Great Firewall sounds wonderful. It would be like rapid public transit behind the iron curtain. You can go quickly and conveniently to any dim, depressing place we let you go.
Do you really believe everything in the USSR was dim and depressing? Do you also think everything is Mexico is tinted yellow?
What would anyone need 50Gb for?
Like seriously, what would that get you what you can't do now?
My local Network adapter isn't half that fast
That's the thing, it's hard to imagine what we'll use it for until it's available.
Because everyone there uses the Internet?
Yeah not one soul uses the internet over there, but they're doing it anyway just to shit on Verizon
That's cool, but all the important stuff doesn't take much.
50gbps **shared line using passive optical splitters. Bit misleading there Chona, nobody is getting an actual 50gbps connection to their house.
Getting real tired of these „China is 30 years ahead of us“ clickbait headlines on an almost daily basis. They‘re always completely overblown and sadly really warp the public perception of the country and their government.
I'm sure the hardware for 50Gbps optics wouldn't be cheap for the consumer 🤣
The “innovation” in the article is passive tech for fiber to the room (FTTR), specifically made to be low cost and easier to implement. It’s also how your computer might get that 50Gbit - it’ll have to be wired in with a fiber connection. It’s not happening over WiFi (or even Ethernet)
Enterprise adopted 100GbE networking around 2019. You can now buy used network cards for around $100 each.
Most residential fiber globally currently is GPON with a 1-2 Gbps shared line using passive optical splitters, split up to 32 ways. Raising that shared line to 50 Gbps is a great upgrade.
It sounds like 50 gig PON is the next logical step. We’ve deployed XGSPON, which is 10x10 Gbps shared between whatever splitter you want to use(anywhere from like 8 way to 128, we generally use 32 way splitters), and we’re testing equipment that will supposedly be supported to 100Gbps PON. Things are moving quickly!
"Chona"
Hahah.
Its not that out of this world, though it is currently completely unneccessary. 10gb+ has been somewhat common residentially for years.
They're over here talking about 50Gb XGS-PON for residential like anyone is actually going to use it. I bet their end users will still complain about slow speeds.