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China has launched a national experimental research network designed to support experimentation with future network designs and improve data transmission quality, with early demonstrations centered on extreme data movement and tightly controlled traffic behavior. The China Network Innovation Environment (CENI) was officially launched this week, with 72TB of data transferred over 1,000 kilometers, according to Chinese state media.
The network’s most notable results came from long-distance transmission tests connected to the Five Hundred Meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) in Guizhou Province. In that trial, researchers transferred 72 terabytes of data to Hubei Province in about 1.6 hours, covering a route of about 1,000 kilometers. According to published data, throughput is roughly close to 100 Gbps. Chinese media compared this to traditional Internet transmission, claiming that the same data set would take nearly two years to transmit over typical public network paths.
CENI is built to meet the needs of data-intensive scientific facilities and distributed computing workloads. FAST alone is said to generate approximately 100 TB of data per day, which puts a huge strain on the shared best-effort WAN.
The network reportedly spans more than 40 cities and more than 55,000 kilometers of fiber, and the underlying platform is designed 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.
In addition to throughput, CENI’s designers emphasized deterministic networking as a core goal. Deterministic networks are designed to guarantee latency, jitter, and packet delivery characteristics over long distances that are difficult to maintain on the public Internet. Wu Bingqing, a Chinese researcher at the Jiangsu Future Network Innovation Institute, compared CENI to early national research networks such as ARPANET, which were used to form much of the early Internet.
While CENI claims to be based on a controlled demonstration, it’s clear that the project is happening at scale, with transmission speeds of 100 Gbps, thousands of virtualized networks, and coverage across much of the country. China is investing significant resources in exploring how future networks can support data-intensive scientific and artificial intelligence workloads at the national level.
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