China's new nation-spanning network eclipses 100 Gbps transferring 72 terabytes across 1,000km — experimental research network designed to connect thousands of virtualized networks across the country
China has brought online a national experimental research network designed to support experimentation on future network designs and to improve data transmission quality, with early demonstrations centered on extreme data movement and tightly controlled traffic behavior. The China Environment for Network Innovation, or CENI, was formally switched on this week, according to Chinese state media, transferring 72TB over 1,000 kilometers.
The network’s most notable result comes from a long-distance transfer test linked to the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) in Guizhou province. In that trial, researchers moved 72 terabytes of data to Hubei province in about 1.6 hours across a route of roughly 1,000 kilometers. Based on the published figures, that roughly works out to a throughput close to 100 Gbps. Chinese outlets contrasted this with conventional internet transfers, claiming the same dataset would take nearly 2 years to transfer over typical public network paths.
CENI has been built in response to the demands of data-heavy scientific facilities and distributed compute workloads. FAST alone is said to generate around 100 terabytes of data per day, volumes that strain shared, best-effort wide-area networks.
The network reportedly spans more than 40 cities and more than 55,000 kilometers of optical fiber, and the underlying platform is built to host thousands of parallel virtual networks, allowing researchers to run isolated experiments on top of shared physical infrastructure. Information from various sources indicates support for more than 4,000 concurrent test services, multiple cloud data centers, and dozens of edge nodes connected via dense wavelength-division multiplexing at 100 Gbps per channel.
Beyond throughput, CENI’s designers emphasize deterministic networking as a core goal. Deterministic networks aim to guarantee latency, jitter, and packet delivery characteristics across long distances, properties that are difficult to maintain on the public Internet. Chinese researcher Bingqing Wu of the Jiangsu Future Network Innovation Institute has compared CENI to earlier national research networks such as ARPANET in the United States, which were used to complete much of the formative work that led to the early Internet.
While CENI’s claims rest on controlled demonstrations, it’s clear that this project is taking place on a massive scale, with 100 Gbps transfers, thousands of virtualized networks, and a footprint spanning much of the country. China is committing significant resources to exploring how future networks might support data-intensive science and AI workloads at a national level.
Luke James is a freelance writer and journalist. Although his background is in legal, he has a personal interest in all things tech, especially hardware and microelectronics, and anything regulatory.
Or if they paid their taxes, instead of structuring the business not too.
thats entirely different issue.
if the nation/business is so high on ai/datacenters this is incentive to build up high speed infrastructure...and as much as I ahte them if this is what it takes to get the fiber we were promised then i am all for it becasue even after the fad dies we'd still have a better & faster network infrastructure.
“In that trial, researchers moved 72 terabytes of data to Hubei province in about 1.6 hours across a route of roughly 1,000 kilometers. Based on the published figures, that roughly works out to a throughput close to 100 Gbps. Chinese outlets contrasted this with conventional internet transfers, claiming the same dataset would take nearly 2 years to transfer over typical public network paths.”
That sounds fast, but for comparison, it probably would have taken just under 24 hours from/to my home connection. That two-year figure just makes me feel sad for whoever wrote that. However, progress is still progress. Hopefully this project actually helps the people and not merely the typical hidden agendas.
I just wonder how they came up with the claim that 72TB would take a year to transfer over public internet. That’s pure BS. I don’t even have fiber and I can download 100GB games in a few minutes….
This will make China the most powerful nation in the world. They'll have a totally secure government run network and all the resources and more to hack the hell out of the west and destabilise any country they want.
They've done what the west should have done, and totally committed to the future of communications systems, regardless of the cost, for the future security of the country, instead of drip feeding progress at a glacial rate to maintain their rich lifestyles.
It's the perfect time to unveil the progress they've made, after Trump has totally destroyed the west's ability to trade, cut off China's help and given control of the west's hardware stocks to puerile AI projects.
