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.
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
Well, at least they’re doing it quietly.
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/
What would anyone need 50Gb for?
Like seriously, what would that get you what you can’t do now?
My local Network adapter isn’t half that fast
That’s the thing, it’s hard to imagine what we’ll use it for until it’s available.
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.
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.
there could be some new thing that no one has not even bothered to think about because of the limitations. Imagine streaming back when downloading few kilobytes for an hours was considered reasonable, people would have laughed at the very thought of it.
How exactly does NAT prevent that? On good hardware it adds insignificant latency.
It has nothing to do with latency, and everything to do with not being able to directly address things behind NAT.
Take a look at
devContainersas an idea that might be generalized. It’s just docker containers so so big but not huge however the use case ….devContainersare a complete portable development environment, with support from major IDEs. Let’s say I want to work on a Java service. I open my IDE, it pulls the latest Java devContainer with my environment and all my tools, fetches the latest from git, and I’m ready to go. The problem with this use case is I’m waiting this whole time. I don’t want to sit around for a minute or two every time I want to edit a program. The latest copy needs to be here, now, as I open my IDEMaybe don’t rely on cloud garbage for basic development?
Unless you’re going to host your own YouTube…
This is exactly what peer tube is struggling with. This bandwidth would solve the video federation problem.
See, you get it!
Except we need IPv6 before that’s at all viable.
We are not even filling out the bandwidth of pipes we have to the home right now. “If you build it, they will come” does not apply when there’s already something there that isn’t being fully utilized.
Oh, maybe. I’m not familiar with bandwidth utilization in China.
So I’m just going to be a completely different person once I have access to these speeds or you are suggesting new tech that will be made available to consumers?
The second one.
Think back to when you were on dial-up. The concept of a streaming movie service would have been a fantasyland. No one was creating one. The infrastructure wasn’t there. It was impossible.
As soon as people started getting broadband, and enough people got it, streaming services could exist.
Are you different? No, you just want to watch a movie. But now you don’t have to go to Blockbuster.
Yes but have you considered China bad?
China morally bankrupt and developing at a staggering pace which has somewhat stymied as their scoffing at regulations in favor of backroom dealings is kneecapping themselves.
So if you zoom in close enough, like looking at this amazingly fast reported internet speed and only at this speed, China “good.”
Notice how many extra hoops you jumped through to get here
To arrive at “China Good,” yes you do need to jump through many hoops. Glad we’re on the same page, even if you started out strangely.
Lmao the irony
You have serious ego issues that you will need self reflection to fix.
Feel free to elaborate. I have no idea what you’re talking about other than it seems like tankie screeching to me.
And then he blocked me XD
All these egotistical children with nothing to be proud of
Who blocked you?
It’s not fast it’s more of more bandwidth, means more people can be connected from one line. Speed will remain the same.
For me, the normal stuff. Mathematically my gig fiber is overkill for my usage. And internet services can rarely keep up with that - you want to download some update or new game? It’s throttled at the source regardless of your internet connection
But in reality when I visit people with “fast enough” internet, I always see glitches and buffering and lag. While it usually serves the need and sometimes gets advertised bandwidth, gig fiber always serves the need. I shouldn’t have to complain about my network or worry about how many streams or how big a download or how many people on their phones. I should never worry about lag during games or interrupted video calls. And I shouldn’t have to worry about sketchy broadband providers (like xFinity/ConCast) way over provisioning their lines or otherwise never delivering marketed bandwidth.
Gig fiber delivers. Always. Like any good infrastructure you don’t even have to think about it: it just always does the job
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.
We’ll solve that with AI. Because you can solve anything by saying “AI”.
What about quantum computing? I don’t want anything without quantum computing.
That goes without saying.
Quantum computing with AI
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.
Horses are fucked in China. They winnie all the time.
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.
Yeah, one thing at a time
/s
50gbps **shared line using passive optical splitters. Bit misleading there Chona, nobody is getting an actual 50gbps connection to their house.
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.
It sounds like 50 gig PON is the next logical step. We’ve deployed XGSPON, which is 10x10 Gbps shared between whatever splitter you want to use(anywhere from like 8 way to 128, we generally use 32 way splitters), and we’re testing equipment that will supposedly be supported to 100Gbps PON. Things are moving quickly!
I’m sure the hardware for 50Gbps optics wouldn’t be cheap for the consumer 🤣
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.
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)
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.
(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.
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.
Its not that out of this world, though it is currently completely unneccessary. 10gb+ has been somewhat common residentially for years.
“Chona”
Hahah.
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.
640kb should be enough for anybody.
640kb? Luxury.
Chinese infrastructure developing is truly impressive. I guess that’s one benefit of being in an imperial dictatorship.
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 totally believe him. Also it seems like he doesn’t have absolute control, but what do I know.
I think few people missed the sarcasm
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.
What do you think would happen if he started doing things the people able to recall him didn’t like?
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.
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
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!
So 50Gbps internet.
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.
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)
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.
Hi from Canada. 1.5 Gbps for $66 a month plus cellphone plan of $50 🤦🏼
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.
I have a 40Mbps down, 5Mbps up connection for $30. Consider yourself as real lucky.
I do 🙂
Yeah, I was on that until the other week, when my area finally got upgraded to 1Gbps.
It’s nice for big downloads (and with game sizes what they are now, that bit is a big difference), but for regular use? Not really a vast change. It’s nice that your bandwidth doesn’t suddenly vanish when one of your unattended devices decides to wake up and download a 20GB update for a game you haven’t played in months I guess.
I think you’ve misread my comment or there is some misunderstanding.
Just in case, it’s a misread, my speed is 40 Mega bit per second - not 40 mega byte per second.
I have to choose what I want to do and do those things with consideration, otherwise things like streaming will buffer a lot.
If you thought I said 40MBps, then I’d agree, as i imagine the difference between 320Mbps and 1Gbps won’t be noticed unless you’re timing large downloads.
Yeah, I know. I was on 30Mbps. Took like 5 minutes to download a gigabyte. Now it takes around 10 seconds.
But most video streaming sites are well below that, and web pages are a few MB tops. The only noticeable difference is when doing larger downloads.
lol I have 3Mbps down .5 up for 40$
RIP. I guess you live in the back end of no where.
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.
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
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
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?
‘quietly’
