China’s CENI: The New Age of Data Transmission

The China Environment for Network Innovation (CENI) has officially launched in China. This national experimental network aims to support scientific experiments with truly large data volumes and create networks with guaranteed quality and data transmission speeds.

CENI has already been tested in transmitting data from the giant FAST radio telescope (Guizhou province) to a processing center in Hubei province. A 72-terabyte dataset was transmitted over a distance of 621 miles in just 1.6 hours at a connection speed of 100 Gbps. In comparison, sending the same data volume over the regular public Internet would take nearly two years.

This high-speed conduit has been driven by modern scientific needs. FAST alone generates about 100 terabytes of data daily. CENI’s infrastructure spans over 40 cities and includes 34,175 miles of fiber optics. The network’s architecture allows the creation of thousands of isolated virtual networks.

A key feature of CENI is the ‘deterministic network’ – a technology ensuring ultra-low latency and stable data packet delivery over long distances, something challenging to achieve in conventional networks. Chinese researchers liken the launch of CENI to the creation of the American ARPANET, which eventually paved the way for the World Wide Web.

Beyond its impressive technical specifications, CENI represents a strategic advancement for China’s scientific community, enabling unprecedented research collaboration across huge data sets.