Incredible new fiber tech (we won't see it in Kitsap)

Each day, something amazing comes across my desk. However, once in a while (years), something comes across my desk that is mind blowing. This morning I came across a new fiber technology called Hollow Core Fiber (HCF). The researchers have productized years of R&D to make a four strand bundle of HCF filaments. The central portion is hollow, as in air. The diameter of that central portion is 9 microns or 1/3 of 1/1000th of an inch. The support features are 1/10th of that size! Apparently we can terminate HCF with standard field termination techniques. I don’t think we can fusion splice HCF, but I want to get my hands on some. To emphasize how amazing this is, those small pentagon shapes are the same size as a transistor in an Intel 486 processor from 1989.

The extra 6 hexagonal openings involve quantum effects to maintain phase dispersion. Light doesn’t travel down those channels, rather they “guide” the quantum field of the photons travelling down the central core to stay coaxially aligned to the center of the central core. It is serious egghead stuff dealing with subatomic particles.

By using air as the “transport”, the light travels 1.5 microseconds per kilometer faster than in solid glass fiber (the gold standard up till now) This cuts the margin off of one of Starlink’s boosts, which was faster than terrestrial latency due to satellite to satellite hops in vacuum.

HCF will eventually be deployed on long haul networks, (NY to San Diego, NY to London, Seattle to Japan) as the latency improvement (1ms per 1000km) and increased distance between optical amplifiers will justify the investment.

Oh, and as an added bonus, HCF enables quantum encryption on the links and that would be a topic of another post.

Hollow Core Fiber