Data that would take 699 days to transmit over the traditional Internet was transferred in just 1.6 hours on a testbed for China’s future networks.
China has officially commissioned its first national ICT science and technology infrastructure — the China Environment for Network Innovation (CENI) — and the results are eye-opening.
In a real-world experiment, 72 terabytes of data generated by the FAST radio telescope in Guizhou were transmitted to a university in central China in 1.6 hours. FAST produces around 100 TB of data every single day, making efficient, reliable transmission a long-standing bottleneck for science and AI research.
CENI is not just faster internet. It is a large-scale, programmable, and deterministic future network testbed, designed to rethink how data moves in the AI era. After more than a decade of construction, it now spans 40 cities, with over 55,000 kilometers of optical links, capable of supporting thousands of parallel experiments while seamlessly connecting with today’s internet.
According to leading engineers, CENI enables breakthroughs in 5G-Advanced, 6G, large-model training, and service-customized networks. Training a 100-billion-parameter AI model across domains can now run at a radically higher efficiency, cutting both time and cost.
