China turns on a vast experimental network it says is an heir to ARPANET
- Reference: 1766113174
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2025/12/19/china_environment_for_network_innovation/
- Source link:
As [1]reported in Chinese state media, tests of the network saw it shift 72 terabytes of data in 1.6 hours, across a distance of around 1,000 km between a radio telescope in Guizhou province and a university in Hubei. We think that’s almost 100 Gbit/s, an impressive feat for a sustained long-distance data transfer even if it took place in a controlled environment.
CENI took over a decade to build and now links 40 Chinese cities with over 55,000 kilometers of optic fiber. State media says it can support 128 heterogeneous networks and 4,096 parallel heterogeneous service tests.
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China often lets its techies describe the nation’s technological triumphs at international conferences, and in November one of them – Bingqing Wu of the Jiangsu Future Network Innovation Institute – delivered a talk about CENI at the HEPiX Forum, a conference at which high-energy physics types talk tech.
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His [5]presentation about CENI is an eye-opener as it compares China’s network to ARPANET and the Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI) – US research networks used to do much of the formative work that gave us the internet and so much more. Both ARPANET and GENI have been decommissioned, although many nations and institutions operate more modern research networks – a class of facility referred to as a “national research and education network.”
[6]China details relocation plan for up to five million datacenter racks
[7]China updates national computing plan with calls for more edge, storage, memory, and … Blu-ray?
[8]When it comes to cloud, it's China against the world
[9]DARPA making low-hanging satellites that use air to move
Here’s another goal for CENI mentioned in the presentation:
Support the offensive and defensive exercises of national cyber security monitoring and defense technologies and the verification of security guarantee capabilities, so that China can seize the initiative in the international competition in cyberspace.
The HEPiX presentation also mentions one of the goals for CENI is to develop networking innovations “5-10 years ahead of the industry,” and that Chinese tech giants Huawei and Baidu have already used the network to test their tech. The latter company has apparently already used CENI to vastly increase the efficiency of corpus acquisition when moving data for AI inferencing and training workloads.
That’s a notable mention as China is trying to build a homebrew AI stack. CENI shows it already has a very handy tool to advance that effort. ®
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[1] https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202512/18/WS694397cea310d6866eb2f4fd.html
[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/networks&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2aUTb6SgTh0tCvRuoCOFTigAAAEY&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/networks&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aUTb6SgTh0tCvRuoCOFTigAAAEY&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/networks&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33aUTb6SgTh0tCvRuoCOFTigAAAEY&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[5] https://indico.cern.ch/event/1536836/contributions/6772650/attachments/3167503/5629776/CENI%20Briefingv0.1pptx.pdf
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2022/02/22/china_west_and_east_datacenter_plan/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2023/10/09/china_computing_action_plan/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2024/08/21/china_cloud_market/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2025/11/19/darpas_vleo_satellite_program_advances/
[10] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
not quite right
They have a large population and a large country so your point isn't quite right.
It's not a "build it and they will come", it's "we have a legitimate need for XYZ internally" and if it also has success internationally then that's good but the ROI has already been meet via internal demand.
Their main protagonist, the US, can only dream of such success in areas like clean energy power generation, roading, fast rail, EV manufacturing, vertical manufacturing integration, education etc etc.
They are a nation focused on each others success rather than engaged in cultural and political wars that means (in the US case) it's impossible for a national consensus on areas of national importance (aside from blowing stuff up in other peoples back yards over the last 60 years).
In this specific case, they will derive massive benefits from such a project while, for example, the US rural broadband rollout is a dead duck... lot's of money but nothing happens.
Due to pressure from the US, the Chinese will/have become self-sufficient in many areas to the point where US tech won't be needed so sanctions etc from the US will/have become meaningless.
Bluck
It's endearing China is always trying to build all these massive global infrastructure projects they hope to have unyielding control over, but the philosophy of "if you build it, they will come" is kind of moot if someone else already built it and everyone else already went to that. The world now more than ever adores open standards, it's the only reason DeepSeek/Qwen are even a blip on the radar. The second China tries to push some sort of network or standard only they control, the rest of the world will point out that we already have it, and it's open.