50gbps **shared line using passive optical splitters. Bit misleading there Chona, nobody is getting an actual 50gbps connection to their house.
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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
Enterprise adopted 100GbE networking around 2019. You can now buy used network cards for around $100 each.
Most residential fiber globally currently is GPON with a 1-2 Gbps shared line using passive optical splitters, split up to 32 ways. Raising that shared line to 50 Gbps is a great upgrade.
"Chona"
Hahah.
Written in Switzerland from my 25GBps symmetric connection (for like 60$/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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Man, real countries are doing this shit while the US is doing an illegal war on the thought crime of being"woke".
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.
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.
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.
Those will be some hot NICs.
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.
I would rather have 50,000,000,000bps
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.
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.
While us taxpayer and ISP consumer is getting fuck all for their taxes and fees
Parasites just looting.
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.