China's 10G pilots underway despite lack of use cases

　　With 1-gigabit optical still in its infancy, now might seem a little early to start moving to 10G. That's not the view in China, which doesn’t hide its ambition to lead the world in every technology segment.

　　Under instructions from the Ministry of Industry and IT (MIIT), Chinese operators last year rolled out 168 10G pilots across the country, half of them run by China Mobile. The trials support three distinct scenarios – residential communities, factories and industrial parks. Apart from that, few details have been publicly disclosed.

　　The trials seek to build on China's gigabit user population, which has grown dramatically – from 6.4 million in 2020 to 239 million in late 2025, China Industry News reports. As far as anyone can tell, that's almost the entire world user base. Even so, it leaves more than 410 million subscribers yet to upgrade to 1G. How many will be demanding 10G when it becomes available?

　　Government experts acknowledge the real challenge is to find viable commercial applications.

　　'Significantly higher investment'

　　Duan Hucai, a senior engineer at MIIT research arm CAICT, says the pilot services are attractive mostly to tech enthusiasts, well heeled families and digital factories. Based on the commercialization timetable of 1Gbit/s, he estimates it would likely take another three to five years for 10G broadband demand to emerge – assuming new, high-bandwidth use cases emerge.

　　Pan Helin, a member of the MIIT's expert Committee on ICT, said the pilot rollouts aimed to solve technical problems and explore new applications. But he agreed the biggest problem was that while 10G optical required "significantly higher investment, the perceived improvement for most users may not be as substantial as for gigabit networks."

　　A China Mobile Beijing spokesperson cited consumer use cases including 8K video, high-speed upload and download for cloud NAS, and cloud gaming – a pretty scant list. It’s hard to see just what 10G can deliver that 1G can't.

　　Enterprises and factories are a different matter, with some obviously requiring extremely low latency or high levels of reliability and customization. But when it comes to household broadband, 10G has a distinct 5G vibe – a shiny new technology in search of a purpose. Still, if there are any bandwidth-hogging services waiting to be uncovered, they will turn up in China first.