"a single fibre can carry more than five times the traffic of conventional systems, while transmission capacity per core increases by nearly half" [five times]
The article frames this as a deliberate infrastructure build-out explicitly linked to future AI network demands, jointly executed by a state-owned telecom giant and its industrial partners. This pattern — state-directed consortia solving physical-layer bottlenecks ahead of commercial demand — generalizes beyond China Mobile to a broader dynamic where governments treat optical networking capacity as strategic AI infrastructure, not merely a commercial telecom upgrade.