Microsoft-backed boffins show mega speed boost with hollow-core fiber

A team of networking boffins has published fresh research on hollow fiber cables that it claims could offer the lowest ever recorded optical loss for a fiber – meaning the signal would weaken less as it travels, leading to faster speeds and lower latencies.

Those lower latencies, crucially, could cut the time needed to move data between cloud datacenters, and well as speeding up mobile networks.

A few years ago, Microsoft bought Lumenisity, a spinoff from the University of Southampton that had already trialed its hollow-core fiber (HCF) cables with UK incumbent telco BT. The team, which is still attached to the university but now also enjoys Microsoft's hefty resources, said on Monday that it had finally come up with a design that could significantly beat conventional optical fibers on both loss and bandwidth.

So you need to amplify less .... It can lead to greener networks if this is how ...