Note here that "faster" here really means more speed and not an increase in the volume of data transferred : The light go through the air hollow-core so can go at near "c" (the speed of light in vacuum) speed, instead of being constrained to "speed of light in glass which is only "2/3 c". This allows reduce latency for long distance communication.
It's true, but for most cases, the volume of a fiber is not the problem anyway. Latency is a problem most of us somehow bump into every day, while most fibers in the ground are nowhere near what you can push out of DWDM (e.g., off-the-shelf equipment will easily allow you to run 20x100Gbit over a single fibre, but many of them only carry a single 10Gbit or even 1Gbit link).
Trans-continental is different, because you'll need amplifiers. Many, many amplifiers in a row. And those generally work well only in a fairly limited band. But unless you're doing submarine, bandwidth is almost never the problem.
To make things worse, a lot of existing medium-haul fiber links are actually twice as long as you'd expect, due to the desire to cancel out dispersion; you first run the fiber e.g. 10km from place to place, and then run it through a large 10km spool (of a slightly different type of fiber) in the datacenter to cancel out the dispersion. This is slowly going away, but only slowly.
Thanks for your precision. Off-topic: It's true that "faster Internet" means "bigger Internet" in common language, just like in photography "faster lens" means "lens with more light gathering capability". I wonder if there's other field where "faster" is misused.
"There has not been a significant improvement in the minimum attenuation—a measure of the loss of optical power per kilometer traveled—of optical fibers in around 40 years...
"The new design maintains low losses of around 0.2 dB/km over a 66 THz bandwidth and boasts 45% faster transmission speeds...
"The new fiber is a kind of nested antiresonant nodeless hollow core fiber (DNANF) with a core of air surrounded by a meticulously engineered glass microstructure.
"The team believes that further research can reduce losses even more, possibly down to 0.01 dB/km, and also help to tune the fiber for low-loss operation at different wavelengths. Even the losses achieved, however, open up the potential for longer unamplified spans in undersea and terrestrial cables and high-power laser delivery and sensing applications, among others."
> "The new design maintains low losses of around 0.2 dB/km over a 66 THz bandwidth and boasts 45% faster transmission speeds...
0.2 dB/km is already a pretty common loss ratio, though. It's true that you won't get that over the entire 1310–1550nm range (the ~35 THz range commonly in use), but you generally can't use all of that for long-haul links anyway due to the way repeaters work.
More interestingly, they promise 0.06 dB/km or so in the most relevant bands. If they can keep that up, it would mean less need for amplifiers, which is a Good Thing(TM).
This could be a big deal for multiplayer gaming. Right now there is enough margin in splitting east/west regions in latency sensitive games. With HCF, the argument for talking to one central region starts to prevail. For a game like counter strike with client-server, you don't actually need to go coast to coast. The server is the authority. If everyone can talk to Dallas or Ohio in <50ms they're probably going to have an OK time.
I really didn't see this coming. After 40 years of fibre I just thought we should roll this out across the globe as the solution to every home and we had data transmission solved and likely wouldn't need an upgrade until we found something substantially better, maybe quantum entanglement communication. Turns out it was improvable and now the insane amounts of fibre we have already deployed is now obsolete.
The currently installed fibre cables work just as well as they did a year ago. Calling them obsolete is a bit of stretch.
Besides, I think most homes are not even close to using the full capability of what fibre can offer nor do a lot of people need that extra bit of speed to browse Instagram/Facebook/YouTube/Whatever else.
The improvements here are likely irrelevant for last mile. If hollow core fully replaces solid core, last mile deployments would use it, but saving 33% of latency in a fiber that's almost certainly less than 5 ms long isn't cost effective if there is any economic cost. The reduction in loss also doesn't provide a benefit for short runs. If there's an improvement in splicing, that might be useful for last mile, if splicing is harder, then it's less likely to be adopted.
On medium and long distance runs, it will provide a lot of benefits. Reducing latency on a cross country link is palpable; reducing latency on a shorter link like LA to SF is valuable too, because some routes have many of those. Reducing the number of amplifiers needed will be apprechiated by cable operators as well, fewer points of failure, likely a lower power budget, etc.
It may obsolete existing long haul fiber. But installed fiber will still be useful even if there's better fiber that could be installed... And existing fiber will be useful for redundancy and additional capacity even if there's better fiber on the same route.
The fiber ran right now is nowhere near reaching it’s theoretical usage. The issue is now, and always has been, having someone actually run it. That costs money. It’s also a bit more physically vulnerable, and requires some more care to not destroy, which makes the actually running it part a bit more expensive than copper in many circumstances.
This won’t change anything for 99% of new fiber deployments, and practically doesn’t make any difference for existing fiber deployments either. The actual media is still 100x more capable than anyone’s end termination equipment outside of a lab.
You probbaly need a specialised crew to do this and as such such fiber won't be installed in your own neighbourhood for your Fiber-to-the-Home connection anytime soon I guess. But, maybe in a few decades it will.
When such technology becomes practical for the large telco's it will be implemented soon as this saves on attenuation equipment.
I can say from direct experience doing research with hollow-core fibres that they are not easy to splice either to each other or to standard fibre. Imagine trying to use heat to melt together a pipe and a solid cylinder without creating a mess.
Below are some great videos on the physics and practicalities of single mode fiber. They are Thorlabs videos, so are slanted more towards the use of SMF in a laser lab rather than a telecom setting. They reference a lot of the theory, but also provide a good intuition about how and why SMF works so well.
HCF came up in the recent IEEE Hot Interconnect Microsoft talked a few min about deploying in their HPC datacenters for AI latency reduction important to All Reduce/Gather operations typically in rings that need to converge and where slowest process dictates the pace
GistNoesis|5 months ago
https://spie.org/news/photonics-focus/julyaug-2022/speeding-...
Sesse__|5 months ago
Trans-continental is different, because you'll need amplifiers. Many, many amplifiers in a row. And those generally work well only in a fairly limited band. But unless you're doing submarine, bandwidth is almost never the problem.
To make things worse, a lot of existing medium-haul fiber links are actually twice as long as you'd expect, due to the desire to cancel out dispersion; you first run the fiber e.g. 10km from place to place, and then run it through a large 10km spool (of a slightly different type of fiber) in the datacenter to cancel out the dispersion. This is slowly going away, but only slowly.
davidkuennen|5 months ago
PetitPrince|5 months ago
hyperhello|5 months ago
chasil|5 months ago
"There has not been a significant improvement in the minimum attenuation—a measure of the loss of optical power per kilometer traveled—of optical fibers in around 40 years...
"The new design maintains low losses of around 0.2 dB/km over a 66 THz bandwidth and boasts 45% faster transmission speeds...
"The new fiber is a kind of nested antiresonant nodeless hollow core fiber (DNANF) with a core of air surrounded by a meticulously engineered glass microstructure.
"The team believes that further research can reduce losses even more, possibly down to 0.01 dB/km, and also help to tune the fiber for low-loss operation at different wavelengths. Even the losses achieved, however, open up the potential for longer unamplified spans in undersea and terrestrial cables and high-power laser delivery and sensing applications, among others."
Sesse__|5 months ago
0.2 dB/km is already a pretty common loss ratio, though. It's true that you won't get that over the entire 1310–1550nm range (the ~35 THz range commonly in use), but you generally can't use all of that for long-haul links anyway due to the way repeaters work.
More interestingly, they promise 0.06 dB/km or so in the most relevant bands. If they can keep that up, it would mean less need for amplifiers, which is a Good Thing(TM).
bob1029|5 months ago
PaulKeeble|5 months ago
mschild|5 months ago
Besides, I think most homes are not even close to using the full capability of what fibre can offer nor do a lot of people need that extra bit of speed to browse Instagram/Facebook/YouTube/Whatever else.
toast0|5 months ago
On medium and long distance runs, it will provide a lot of benefits. Reducing latency on a cross country link is palpable; reducing latency on a shorter link like LA to SF is valuable too, because some routes have many of those. Reducing the number of amplifiers needed will be apprechiated by cable operators as well, fewer points of failure, likely a lower power budget, etc.
It may obsolete existing long haul fiber. But installed fiber will still be useful even if there's better fiber that could be installed... And existing fiber will be useful for redundancy and additional capacity even if there's better fiber on the same route.
lazide|5 months ago
This won’t change anything for 99% of new fiber deployments, and practically doesn’t make any difference for existing fiber deployments either. The actual media is still 100x more capable than anyone’s end termination equipment outside of a lab.
bragr|5 months ago
nicholasbraker|5 months ago
When such technology becomes practical for the large telco's it will be implemented soon as this saves on attenuation equipment.
binbag|5 months ago
anotherpaulg|5 months ago
https://youtu.be/FbOXRuBQt_U
https://youtu.be/HvJeXakc8Kc
jimmySixDOF|5 months ago
https://youtu.be/vuo6KfdRRZw&t=479
nmstoker|5 months ago
thenthenthen|5 months ago
rtrgrd|5 months ago
diamondage|5 months ago
aaron695|5 months ago
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curtisszmania|5 months ago
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