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.

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.

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