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.
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.
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.
Yep, which makes alarmist articles like this ridiculous.
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.
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 😞
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.
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.
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!
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.
640kb should be enough for anybody.
640kb? Luxury.
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?
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
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.
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
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.
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
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!
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.
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.
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)
(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.
Enterprise adopted 100GbE networking around 2019. You can now buy used network cards for around $100 each.
Those will be some hot NICs.
Is there a community for that? Asking for a friend.
I’m not, I want to subscribe to this newsletter
Hot NICs in your .local
AT&T still hasn’t installed fiber in my old neighborhood where one of their lines cuts straight through a row of houses that conveniently do get fiber, while everyone else is stuck on cable.
Did I mention they received billions in federal funding to upgrade everyone?
So they received money for something they didn’t do. They should pay those back.
American companies being welfare queens, imagine that.
But someone at AT&T would have to sell their yatch
That yacht is fine because someone else at AT&T rotated into a position at the FCC
Well, at least they’re doing it quietly.
Written in Switzerland from my 25GBps symmetric connection (for like 60$/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)
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.
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.
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.
I have a 40Mbps down, 5Mbps up connection for $30. Consider yourself as real lucky.
Yeah, I was on that until the other week, when my area finally got upgraded to 1Gbps.
It’s nice for big downloads (and with game sizes what they are now, that bit is a big difference), but for regular use? Not really a vast change. It’s nice that your bandwidth doesn’t suddenly vanish when one of your unattended devices decides to wake up and download a 20GB update for a game you haven’t played in months I guess.
I think you’ve misread my comment or there is some misunderstanding.
Just in case, it’s a misread, my speed is 40 Mega bit per second - not 40 mega byte per second.
I have to choose what I want to do and do those things with consideration, otherwise things like streaming will buffer a lot.
If you thought I said 40MBps, then I’d agree, as i imagine the difference between 320Mbps and 1Gbps won’t be noticed unless you’re timing large downloads.
Yeah, I know. I was on 30Mbps. Took like 5 minutes to download a gigabyte. Now it takes around 10 seconds.
But most video streaming sites are well below that, and web pages are a few MB tops. The only noticeable difference is when doing larger downloads.
You and I have completely different views and experiences on this, as I don’t agree with your statement at all; which is why I think you’ve misunderstood.
lol I have 3Mbps down .5 up for 40$
RIP. I guess you live in the back end of no where.
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.
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.
They’re probably not building out 50 Gbps to the rice farmers
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(
Virgin will definitely be faster, they’ll do up to a gigabit. Hopefully open reach rolls out fibre to you soon. I only got the fibre to my house last month!
Ty, yeah I have spoken to some neighbours who have Virgin now and they seem quite happy with it, so it looks a good choice to me, through I would see about modem mode with the VM hub as I prefer my own network equipment and hate using ISP ones, currently looking at pfsense or opnsense soon, so hope works well with VM hub :o/
Yup most of the hubs can do modem mode so you should be fine there. I believe their FTTP Hub can’t do it but that’s not in many areas.
Chinese infrastructure developing is truly impressive. I guess that’s one benefit of being in an imperial dictatorship.
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.
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.
