China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) wants 1 million 50G-PON ports deployed across the country by 2030. The target appears in the ministry's just-released five-year ICT plan, the sector-specific version of a national plan that took effect on January 1.

The goal puts China far ahead of most markets, where operators and vendors are still running early trials of the technology. 50G-PON is the industry name for ITU standard G.9804, which defines an optical access network capable of 50Gbit/s downstream and at least 12.5Gbit/s upstream.

Pilots provide the groundwork

China's optical industry is not starting from zero. It can draw on results from 136 pilots conducted last year, each running at 10Gbit/s. The trials tested 50G-PON ultra-wideband, fiber-to-the-room (FTTR) integration with Wi-Fi 7, and optical-AI integration, alongside applications such as cloud computing and gaming.

At the recent China International Optoelectronic Expo (CIOE) in Shenzhen, experts agreed the domestic industry can meet the requirements of large-scale 50G-PON deployment. Two constraints dominated the discussion: cost and power consumption.

AI drives demand — and competes for supply

Unlike many new access technologies, next-generation optical has a ready-made demand driver. Zhang Dechao, deputy head of basic network research at the China Mobile Research Institute, said token operations — the compute transactions behind large AI models — had "completely restructured the traffic model of optical networks."

The old downlink-dominated asymmetric model is gone, he said. Uplink traffic now accounts for 40%–50% of network traffic, "and symmetrical bandwidth has become the mainstream." He cited projections showing that by 2035, AI inference traffic will make up 25% of total traffic and drive more than 63% growth in overall network traffic.

The catch is that AI is simultaneously absorbing the resources needed to build the networks it demands. Lin Tao, marketing director of components supplier Accelink Technologies, warned that AI investment is draining upstream production capacity and operator capex.

"No one is willing to spend money on production capacity or R&D investment in PON-related technologies," he said. "Basically, everyone is going all in on AI. This means that AI is both creating demand for optical access networks and squeezing out and competing for upstream production capacity and capital."

How this tension between demand and supply resolves remains open. But according to China's optical suppliers, core 50G-PON ASIC chips, optical modules and devices are already mature, with large-scale shipments of standard terminal products due to start next year — an early test of whether the 2030 target of 1 million ports is commercially achievable.