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.
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.
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 $60-100 range.
My mistake, I was thinking 100Gb fiber. Even the knock off switch SFPs are hundreds of dollars each.
Most residential fiber globally currently is GPON with a 1-2 Gbps shared line using passive optical splitters, split up to 32 ways. Raising that shared line to 50 Gbps is a great upgrade.
It sounds like 50 gig PON is the next logical step. We’ve deployed XGSPON, which is 10x10 Gbps shared between whatever splitter you want to use(anywhere from like 8 way to 128, we generally use 32 way splitters), and we’re testing equipment that will supposedly be supported to 100Gbps PON. Things are moving quickly!
They’re over here talking about 50Gb XGS-PON for residential like anyone is actually going to use it. I bet their end users will still complain about slow speeds.
Written in Switzerland from my 25GBps symmetric connection (for like 60$/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 $30. Consider yourself as real lucky.
Yeah, I was on that until the other week, when my area finally got upgraded to 1Gbps.
It’s nice for big downloads (and with game sizes what they are now, that bit is a big difference), but for regular use? Not really a vast change. It’s nice that your bandwidth doesn’t suddenly vanish when one of your unattended devices decides to wake up and download a 20GB update for a game you haven’t played in months I guess.
I think you’ve misread my comment or there is some misunderstanding.
Just in case, it’s a misread, my speed is 40 Mega bit per second - not 40 mega byte per second.
I have to choose what I want to do and do those things with consideration, otherwise things like streaming will buffer a lot.
If you thought I said 40MBps, then I’d agree, as i imagine the difference between 320Mbps and 1Gbps won’t be noticed unless you’re timing large downloads.
Yeah, I know. I was on 30Mbps. Took like 5 minutes to download a gigabyte. Now it takes around 10 seconds.
But most video streaming sites are well below that, and web pages are a few MB tops. The only noticeable difference is when doing larger downloads.
You and I have completely different views and experiences on this, as I don’t agree with your statement at all; which is why I think you’ve misunderstood.
I do 🙂
lol I have 3Mbps down .5 up for 40$
RIP. I guess you live in the back end of no where.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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 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
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:
- 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”
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.
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?
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
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
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.
What do you think would happen if he started doing things the people able to recall him didn’t like?
I think few people missed the sarcasm
It feels like they are using this presidency to get as far ahead as they can.
So 50Gbps internet.
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.
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!
640kb should be enough for anybody.
640kb? Luxury.
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.
BRB moving to China
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?
KC starts the beta for 50gig next month.
‘quietly’
