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.
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