China is quietly pushing ahead with massive 50,000Mbps broadband rollout to leapfrog rest of the world on internet speeds

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I have a 40Mbps down, 5Mbps up connection for $30. Consider yourself as real lucky.

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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.

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Why do I care? Why it need to be so fast?

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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?

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360 VR experience with 16K resolution, highly textured touchable surfaces, and smell-o-vision. Only a $40 Meta subscription with ads.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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lol I have 3Mbps down .5 up for 40$

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Latency is much more critical than bandwidth for any sort of real-time VR.

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Big Brother needs bandwidth to watch you in 4K.

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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.

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Seems surprising, especially because Estonia is known for its digitized government. I logically thought that it'd be complemented with decent Internet coverage.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Also doesn't help that SMB is single threaded. Completely mismatched for the era of multicore processors and SSDs.

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We'll solve that with AI. Because you can solve anything by saying "AI".

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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.#

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China is quietly pushing ahead with massive 50,000Mbps broadband rollout to leapfrog rest of the world on internet speeds