China officials push for 10G optical

China is pushing ahead with 10G optical, with the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) and regional governments driving the rollout and commercialization. But with take-up of gigabit broadband still quite low despite its wide availability, they face an uphill battle.

The first 10G converged services launched in Beijing and Shanghai in August on a very limited scale. Pilots are also underway in more than 20 provinces and cities across the country. Ao Li, chief engineer at the China Academy of Information and Communications (CAICT), told an industry conference last month the 10G optical industrial chain was quite mature.

He said the progress of technologies including 50G PON, Wi-Fi 7, long-distance 400G and short-distance 800G had created "better conditions for the construction of 10G optical networks."

Gigabit broadband is available in most of the country's 300 leading cities, and China's gigabit optical network is the world's largest in scale, passing about 80% of households, Ao said.

China also accounts for around two-thirds of the total number of 10G PON OLT ports in operation and 85% of the world's optical access PON ports.

Few have upgraded

Yet despite the presence of the advanced infrastructure, fewer than a quarter of users have so far chosen to upgrade to gigabit broadband. The 10G advocates themselves struggle to explain why users would want to adopt even higher speeds.

Ao called on the industry to "explore new application scenarios" and to use pilot programs to find ways to deliver value to customers.

The Beijing city government unveiled its 10G plan last year, aiming to integrate 10G optical with its burgeoning cloud and AI computing infrastructure. So far "thousands" of pilot applications have been implemented, according to Zhu Chunxia from the city's Information and Communications Administration.

Despite the push to commercialize, operators are just feeling their way. Unicom opened a F5G-A 10G laboratory earlier this year, while Beijing Telecom says it's "working with partners" to explore new applications.

In a first-half stock exchange filing, China Mobile said it had 272 million household broadband customers, of which 34% were gigabit users. China Telecom said gigabit accounted for 20% of its 193 million customer base, while China Unicom reported 117 million broadband customers, of which 25% were using gigabit.