China is quietly pushing ahead with massive 50,000Mbps broadband rollout to leapfrog rest of the world on internet speeds
2 years ago by schizoidman to c/technology
cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/54702508
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)
(or even Ethernet)
Technically, those 100+ Gbps fiber LAN/WAN connections used in data centers are also Ethernet, just not twisted pair.
That said recently I was in a retail store and saw "Cat8" cables for sale that advertised support for 40 Gbps copper ethernet! I wonder if any hardware to support that will ever be released. It is a real standard, approved way back in 2016: https://en.wikipedia.org/...
Those cables are hard to terminate properly. There's an outer grounding sheath that needs to be connected up at both ends. Except for short connections, I find it easier/cheaper to use fiber.
There is nothing preventing housing being built with it, so it's still viable, if currently drastic overkill. Most end-users wont have fiber cards in PCs to begin with, but that isn't insurmountable either.
Probably not where I am, that seems really low. I mean it depends if you use name brand or not. Often I don't use the name brand ones 🤣
I just checked on eBay, and there are multiple listings for single port 100 GbE Mellanox (now nVidia) Connect-X 4 cards in the $60-100 range.
It sounds like 50 gig PON is the next logical step. We’ve deployed XGSPON, which is 10x10 Gbps shared between whatever splitter you want to use(anywhere from like 8 way to 128, we generally use 32 way splitters), and we’re testing equipment that will supposedly be supported to 100Gbps PON. Things are moving quickly!
They're over here talking about 50Gb XGS-PON for residential like anyone is actually going to use it. I bet their end users will still complain about slow speeds.
Written in Switzerland from my 25GBps symmetric connection (for like 60$/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 $30. Consider yourself as real lucky.
Yeah, I was on that until the other week, when my area finally got upgraded to 1Gbps.
It's nice for big downloads (and with game sizes what they are now, that bit is a big difference), but for regular use? Not really a vast change. It's nice that your bandwidth doesn't suddenly vanish when one of your unattended devices decides to wake up and download a 20GB update for a game you haven't played in months I guess.
I think you've misread my comment or there is some misunderstanding.
Just in case, it's a misread, my speed is 40 Mega bit per second - not 40 mega byte per second.
I have to choose what I want to do and do those things with consideration, otherwise things like streaming will buffer a lot.
If you thought I said 40MBps, then I'd agree, as i imagine the difference between 320Mbps and 1Gbps won't be noticed unless you're timing large downloads.
Yeah, I know. I was on 30Mbps. Took like 5 minutes to download a gigabyte. Now it takes around 10 seconds.
But most video streaming sites are well below that, and web pages are a few MB tops. The only noticeable difference is when doing larger downloads.
lol I have 3Mbps down .5 up for 40$
RIP. I guess you live in the back end of no where.
Lol! 10Mbps is usually more than enough. It’s a common misconception that more speed equals less latency.
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.
I have a cheap noname chinese switch with 2x10gbit ports and 4x2.5 Gbps ports, so I have the 10 Gbit ports to the internet and my computer, and use a 2.5 gbps port for my NAS, everything else is 1 gbit
Not OP, but I have my NAS and my office PC on 10Gbps SFP+ fiber, but that's so I can have fast speeds to my NAS. Spinning platters are now the limiting factor on throughput, and it'll be a while before SSDs come down in price enough for the kind of data hoarding volume I have. Roughly needs to be cut in half two more times, which is maybe closer than we all think.
2.5Gbps switches are generally good enough for home use while using plain copper wires, but I use a lot of old enterprise hardware on my network. Enterprise hardware never heard of 2.5Gbps ethernet.
Also, I found out my Unifi Edgerouter X maxed out at 500Mbps unless I shut off a lot of features. Upgraded to an OPNsense box. There's probably a lot of home user routers that are similarly limited.
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
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 don’t have a rational need
- I’d have to replace switches and wiring
- I don’t have the time to commit
- even building a file server that can sustain that bandwidth is a challenge
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.
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:
- price has come down a lot
- very low latency
- high reliability
- more than enough for most people
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.
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.
Have you ever stepped food into China? I have. And I can tell you from personal experience they're living in the future.
They have their own fair share of problems. But the investments they're making into infrastructure are very easily going to catapult them to the head of the class here very shortly...
I'm really tired of being told how distopian China is from people who've never even been there.
Yeah I've been there a bunch and this city centers are definitely impressive. There is plenty of dystopian shit though. Obviously the Internet situation is weird, but I've been basically told I can't go up to my hotel room without my Chinese sponsor.
We’ll be around. We may not be a democracy but we’ll be around.
China though, it’s cooked .
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.
It may be only loosely enforced with fines but there are FTC rules that all online marketing must follow https://www.ftc.gov/...
It does and up helping a little bit. I'm addition to government fines, they also risk class action lawsuits from their customers. I'm willing to bet this is more of a hurdle than China has for state owned companies.
China has this covered hands down. If you say Winnie, two mean looking Chinese men appear behind you.
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).
My point was - people may have consistency in words and actions, but not between words and actions.
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?
So they received money for something they didn't do. They should pay those back.
That yacht is fine because someone else at AT&T rotated into a position at the FCC
We're testing this same tech in the UK as well: https://www.ispreview.co.uk/...
China might be a little ahead but it's hardly a leapfrog.
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.
The article you linked describes plans reaching up to 1000Mbps (1Gbps).
That's only 2% of the speed of the theoretical 50Gbps maximum OP's article discusses (and 10% of the 10Gbps real-world speeds currently available in China according to the same article). I think you have your units mixed up.
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.
I work on PON and XGPON. Officially we work on a -25dB maximum, but I've seen circuits stable at around 30dB.
It's surprising how many bad splices you can ignore before it gets problematic.
-18.5dB is going to limit you to either a really good fibre path, or a really short one. Unless you have options with long-range SFPs? The constant progress keeps my job interesting at least.
I'm working on long range stuff so I'm not so familiar with PON specifically. Maybe I made some bad assumptions. Stable at -30 dBm receive sounds really impressive.
The one I was talking about is this, with 18.5 dB total budget, that is, min +4.5 dBm transmit, and min -14 dBm receive. This one is built with an APD.
In my kind of application, without splitter, this will get you about 30-40 km. We've got one of a slightly older type with 18 dB budget running between Fribourg and Bern for example.
I realize that PON stuff is quite different with the time slitting and I think wavelenght splitting too, at least in XGS-PON, but I was thinking the pure laser and diode physics would need to be the same.
For -25 dBm minimum the most similar of the ones we currently have would be this one which manages -26.9 dBm and is one of the ones with a SOA built in, or for the 10G stuff this one, which manages min -23 dBm but with only an APD and no SOA.
I'm thinking their 50G stuff must be closer to 100G than 10G transceiver design. So I wonder if they manage to make it without SOA.
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.
Not only that, but what's the use case? Who on earth is slinging that much data around?
Those will be some hot NICs.
I'm not, I want to subscribe to this newsletter
Hot NICs in your .local
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"
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.
Bigger Number = Better
The math is mathing correctly
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.
Unless you're going to host your own YouTube....
This is exactly what peer tube is struggling with. This bandwidth would solve the video federation problem.
See, you get it!
Except we need IPv6 before that's at all viable.
We are not even filling out the bandwidth of pipes we have to the home right now. "If you build it, they will come" does not apply when there's already something there that isn't being fully utilized.
there could be some new thing that no one has not even bothered to think about because of the limitations. Imagine streaming back when downloading few kilobytes for an hours was considered reasonable, people would have laughed at the very thought of it.
We're not using the bandwidth we have. Many US cities have service with 1Gbps download speed available. I have it for my own reasons. Servers are the bottleneck; they rarely even reach half that speed.
If we're not using 1Gbps, why should we believe something would pop up if we had 50Gbps?
Now, direct addressing where everyone can be a server and bandwidth utilization is spread more towards the edges of the network? Then you have something that could saturate 1Gbps. But you can't do that on IPv4.
It has nothing to do with latency, and everything to do with not being able to directly address things behind NAT.
Edit: and please, nobody argue that NAT increases security. That dumbass argument should have died the moment it was first uttered.
Take a look at devContainers as an idea that might be generalized. It’s just docker containers so so big but not huge however the use case ….
devContainers are a complete portable development environment, with support from major IDEs. Let’s say I want to work on a Java service. I open my IDE, it pulls the latest Java devContainer with my environment and all my tools, fetches the latest from git, and I’m ready to go. The problem with this use case is I’m waiting this whole time. I don’t want to sit around for a minute or two every time I want to edit a program. The latest copy needs to be here, now, as I open my IDE
But you could generalize this idea. Maybe it’s the next ChromeOS-like thing. All you need is something that can run containers, and everything you do starts with downloading a container with everything you need …… if something like this happens, there’s a great example of needing to be responsive with a lot more data
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?
The second one.
Think back to when you were on dial-up. The concept of a streaming movie service would have been a fantasyland. No one was creating one. The infrastructure wasn't there. It was impossible.
As soon as people started getting broadband, and enough people got it, streaming services could exist.
Are you different? No, you just want to watch a movie. But now you don't have to go to Blockbuster.
Yes but have you considered China bad?
China morally bankrupt and developing at a staggering pace which has somewhat stymied as their scoffing at regulations in favor of backroom dealings is kneecapping themselves.
So if you zoom in close enough, like looking at this amazingly fast reported internet speed and only at this speed, China "good."
Notice how many extra hoops you jumped through to get here
China is a totalitarian regime with more human right, continuing atrocities, corruption, and illegal trade/business practices.
They are also
- bringing a billion people out of poverty and up to modern standards of living in record pace
- building out renewable energy faster than the rest of the world combined
- have like 95% of the worlds EV buses
- are adopting EVs at record pace
- built out the worlds largest high speed rail at record pace
- publish the most scientific paper of any country
- are a hotbed of innovation, manufacturing development
- are quickly building an outstanding space program from almost nothing
Those accomplishments and many more can be celebrated with losing sight of the basic horribleness of their government
What about quantum computing? I don't want anything without quantum computing.
. 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 :/
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.
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.
They are ostensibly a one party state, not a dictatorship.
This sentence feels so Soviet.
Yeah, hate that the world views him as not a dictator, at least formally, but I don't make the rules.
I think few people missed the sarcasm
What do you think would happen if he started doing things the people able to recall him didn't like?
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?
But it's not like the Chinese government to provide that kind of service out of kindness.
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.
That's the thing, it's hard to imagine what we'll use it for until it's available.
That's cool, but all the important stuff doesn't take much.
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
I probably shouldn't have posted it that way. I've been to Bejing, but I picture a lot of rural rice farmers just NOT part of the Internet and of course with censorship rampant, I just figure, why so fast? Sounds like flexing. But maybe I'm wrong.
Even rice farmers watch Netflix.
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50gbps **shared line using passive optical splitters. Bit misleading there Chona, nobody is getting an actual 50gbps connection to their house.
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