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 🤣
Enterprise adopted 100GbE networking around 2019. You can now buy used network cards for around $100 each.
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.
My mistake, I was thinking 100Gb fiber. Even the knock off switch SFPs are hundreds of dollars each.
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/wiki/100_Gigabit_Ethernet#40GBASE-T
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.
“Chona”
Hahah.
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!
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.
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.
I do 🙂
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.
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.
/r/programming
There’s your culprit
You can always hope it’s better than it actually is.
Lol! 10Mbps is usually more than enough. It’s a common misconception that more speed equals less latency.
Hi from Canada. 1.5 Gbps for $66 a month plus cellphone plan of $50 🤦🏼
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.
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
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:
- 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.
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.
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.
OK
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.
Yep, which makes alarmist articles like this ridiculous.
Wait, there are regulations about advertising true speed? Does ComCast know? Does AT&T?
It may be only loosely enforced with fines but there are FTC rules that all online marketing must follow https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/advertising-marketing-internet-rules-road
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.
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.
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).
Even the most evil people can have good moments and we can appreciate those without changing outlet overall opinion.
I’m still waiting for Trump’s good moment
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.
lol
But someone at AT&T would have to sell their yatch
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/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.
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.
Those will be some hot NICs.
Is there a community for that? Asking for a friend.
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!
So 50Gbps internet.
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.
Oh, maybe. I’m not familiar with bandwidth utilization in China.
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.
Take a look at
devContainersas an idea that might be generalized. It’s just docker containers so so big but not huge however the use case ….devContainersare 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 IDEBut 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
Maybe don’t rely on cloud garbage for basic development?
Technically I don’t. I’m also the guy running CI/CD building devContainers for my engineers. They no longer have to worry about updating certificates and tools and versions or security patches, and IT doesn’t have to worry about a lot of crap on their laptops that IT doesn’t manage. Engineers can use a standard laptop install and just get the latest of everything they need, scanned, verified, as soon as it’s available. And since it’s all automated, I can support many variations, and yes they can pull any older version from the repo if they need to, every project can easily be on different versions of different tools and languages
At work, I’m on the same network, but working from home, I still need the responsiveness to do my job
How exactly does NAT prevent that? On good hardware it adds insignificant latency.
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.
Yes but have you considered China bad?
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
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.
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.
We’ll solve that with AI. Because you can solve anything by saying “AI”.
What about quantum computing? I don’t want anything without quantum computing.
Quantum computing with AI
That goes without saying.
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
It’s not fast it’s more of more bandwidth, means more people can be connected from one line. Speed will remain the same.
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.
Well, at least they’re doing it quietly.
640kb should be enough for anybody.
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.
