China's new nation-spanning network eclipses 100 Gbps transferring 72 terabytes across 1,000km — experimental research network designed to connect thousands of virtualized networks across the country

China has launched a new experimental research network, CENI, capable of transferring 72 terabytes over 1,000 kilometers at close to 100 Gbps throughput. The network spans over 40 cities with more than 55,000 kilometers of optical fiber, supporting thousands of virtual networks for isolated experiments. CENI focuses on deterministic networking to ensure latency, jitter, and packet delivery characteristics over long distances, a challenge on the public Internet. This project aims to explore how future networks can handle data-intensive science and AI workloads at a national level, with comparisons drawn to early U.S. research networks like ARPANET.