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 $60-100 range.
My mistake, I was thinking 100Gb fiber. Even the knock off switch SFPs are hundreds of dollars each.
Most residential fiber globally currently is GPON with a 1-2 Gbps shared line using passive optical splitters, split up to 32 ways. Raising that shared line to 50 Gbps is a great upgrade.
“Chona”
Hahah.
Its not that out of this world, though it is currently completely unneccessary. 10gb+ has been somewhat common residentially for years.
Written in Switzerland from my 25GBps symmetric connection (for like 60$/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)
Hi from Canada. 1.5 Gbps for $66 a month plus cellphone plan of $50 🤦🏼
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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
lol
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(
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.
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’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 😞
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.
OK
the us will be lucky if it exists at all in the future
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.
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.
Let me know when any of those those 100gbps lines reach 1gbps xD.
It was in direct relation to 1gbps.
I think you may be confused? 1Gbps is about as good as it gets in Australia.
You are the confused one mate.
The user that I gave the link showing our 1gbps plan commented as if we did not already have 1gbps, hence me showing them that we already have it.
The link was not in relation to 100gbps and was purely a response to the 1gbps comment.
Then I guess it’s my bad thinking you were trying to show 100 gigabit plans
None of those plans actually do reach 1gbps though, you kinda proved their point with your link
Those plans do not reach 1gbps at 7pm when every family in the neighbourhood is online, that is to be expected.
Under ideal situations proximity and network congestion they are capable of hitting the full 1gbps.
Right, so your first mentioned 100gbps will reach what then, 2gbps?
Not sure if youre trolling or just really daft at this point.
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.
It’s up to the ISPs what plans they sell. But cost wise it would be so prohibitive that only a business would buy it for the first few years for sure.
Not only that, but what’s the use case? Who on earth is slinging that much data around?
Small time server admins?
Who would have a server like that actually in their house?
Linus Tech Tips, a company that films multiple hours of 4k or higher content every day, which is uploaded to an offsite backup, as well as uploading edited videos to multiple platforms, made a big deal about having a 10 gigabit Internet connection.
LTT are also a bunch of loonie toon characters cosplaying as techies who lost all their data multiple times to malpractice. I’d hardly uplift them as a banner case.
Possibly not, but if their whole company can run off 10 gigabit, who needs 50 in their house?
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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
To arrive at “China Good,” yes you do need to jump through many hoops. Glad we’re on the same page, even if you started out strangely.
And then he blocked me XD
All these egotistical children with nothing to be proud of
Who blocked you?
Lmao the irony
You have serious ego issues that you will need self reflection to fix.
Feel free to elaborate. I have no idea what you’re talking about other than it seems like tankie screeching to me.
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.
That goes without saying.
Quantum computing with AI
It’s not fast it’s more of more bandwidth, means more people can be connected from one line. Speed will remain the same.
While us taxpayer and ISP consumer is getting fuck all for their taxes and fees
Parasites just looting.
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!
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.
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?
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.
640kb should be enough for anybody.
640kb? Luxury.
