Well, at least they’re doing it quietly.
50gbps **shared line using passive optical splitters. Bit misleading there Chona, nobody is getting an actual 50gbps connection to their house.
“Chona”
Hahah.
Its not that out of this world, though it is currently completely unneccessary. 10gb+ has been somewhat common residentially for years.
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 $60-100 range.
My mistake, I was thinking 100Gb fiber. Even the knock off switch SFPs are hundreds of dollars each.
Most residential fiber globally currently is GPON with a 1-2 Gbps shared line using passive optical splitters, split up to 32 ways. Raising that shared line to 50 Gbps is a great upgrade.
They’re over here talking about 50Gb XGS-PON for residential like anyone is actually going to use it. I bet their end users will still complain about slow speeds.
Man, real countries are doing this shit while the US is doing an illegal war on the thought crime of being"woke".
China has this covered hands down. If you say Winnie, two mean looking Chinese men appear behind you.
Not just this, I’m not sure if they checked about LGBT rights in China.
From outside the first world Trump and his supporters look scandalist, loud, corrupt and incompetent. Which is sad. But they don’t seem fascist most of the time.
Anyway, if we take Putin, he’s done many things, one thing he’s consistently never done is say antisemitic or easily recognizable fascist things. There is some popularity of Ivan Ilyin around him, who is a Russian emigrant fascist philosopher, though (who apparently wanted to fix problems with Mussolini and the own such “thinkers” of the White movement, except he was on the dumber side, so compared to his writings Mein Kampf seems intellectually elegant).
Even the most evil people can have good moments and we can appreciate those without changing outlet overall opinion.
I’m still waiting for Trump’s good moment
My point was - people may have consistency in words and actions, but not between words and actions.
Horses are fucked in China. They winnie all the time.
Yeah, one thing at a time
/s
So 50Gbps internet.
Written in Switzerland from my 25GBps symmetric connection (for like 60$/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 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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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 🤦🏼
Chinese infrastructure developing is truly impressive. I guess that’s one benefit of being in an imperial dictatorship.
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.
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?
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
‘quietly’
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.
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.
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
American companies being welfare queens, imagine that.
lol
640kb should be enough for anybody.
640kb? Luxury.
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!
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
Even rice farmers watch Netflix.
While us taxpayer and ISP consumer is getting fuck all for their taxes and fees
Parasites just looting.
That’s cool, but all the important stuff doesn’t take much.
