British telecommunications company BT is trying to use hollow fiber optic cables in its 5G network and has achieved some promising results.

Daphne Leprince-Ringuet is a journalist based in London.

This technology enables data transmission speeds up to 50% faster than fiber optic cables typically deployed for 5G networks.  

BT, the leading telecommunications provider in the UK, has been experimenting with a new type of optical fiber that can significantly improve the performance of future 5G networks. 

According to Lumenisity, a spin-off company of the University of Southampton that develops the new optical fiber, the technology is called hollow-core optical fiber, and it enables data transmission speeds to be 50% faster than optical cables commonly used in 5G networks. 

Lumenisity and BT have been collaborating at the telecommunications provider's laboratory in Ipswich, east of England, using a 10-km hollow fiber optic cable for playback and testing to understand exactly how to use acceleration in different scenarios. Unsurprisingly, reducing latency in 5G networks was found to be a key use case for the new technology. 

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Although BT is not yet in the stage of buying hollow fiber optic cables in bulk for customers to deploy them in real networks, Andrew Lord, the company's head of optical network research, explained that the trials in the past few months have shown exciting results. 

"We have done all kinds of things with this fiber, we have put it in the oven, we have shaken it, we have put it in the cable to check its robustness," Lord told ZDNet . "And it shows extraordinary characteristics, one of which is that it is 50% faster than standard fiber. Some applications do make sense, especially in the 5G space where equipment delays are limited." 

The strong optical fiber network is intrinsically linked to the deployment of 5G. In order to unlock innovative applications and services as promised, next-generation networks will require higher bandwidth and low latency-this is why providers use small cells and base stations close to end users to provide faster speeds. But these in turn must be connected to a central network, which is usually due to fiber optics. 

Network providers such as BT usually deploy so-called single-mode optical fibers, which are made of solid glass wires and transmit information by guiding light signals from laser transmitters. However, passing through the glass is a little slower than passing through the air, which means that the data carried by the optical signal is slower than it might be. 

On the other hand, as the name suggests, the hollow core fiber developed by Lumenisity has a hollow center filled with air, which runs through the entire length of the optical cable and is wrapped in a glass ring. Therefore, the optical signal can travel at a speed very close to the speed of light—it takes much less time to reach the destination than using standard optical fiber. 

This will provide users with lower latency, whether they are playing games, driving self-driving cars, or using IoT devices; but it may also mean major changes in network providers, and as system efficiency improves, their costs will decline. 

Due to the low latency, the use of air core in the radio access network (RAN) can reduce mobile network costs by allowing more 5G antennas to be provided from one switch or cabinet.

"If fiber provides you with less latency, it means you can push buildings farther and get a building to reach more mobile endpoints," Lord said. "This means you can have fewer buildings, start to integrate your resources and use your budget in different ways."  

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Hollow fiber has been used by a small number of suppliers, who are early adopters of the technology. For example, earlier this year, Lumenisity announced a partnership with euNetworks, which provides bandwidth infrastructure in Western Europe, which is known as the first commercial deployment of the technology. 

The new optical fiber is used to connect the London Stock Exchange with telecommunications provider Interxion to optimize high-frequency trading-in this case, even the additional microsecond delay can have a significant impact on revenue and loss. Users found that the new technology reduced latency by a third and constituted a "significant" savings in financial transaction applications. 

Although BT is still some distance away from the commercialization of hollow-core fiber, Lord has high hopes for the new opportunities that this technology brings. He said that many applications that are critical to latency require a responsive infrastructure. As BT and Lumenisity continue to experiment, it is expected that more use cases and applications will emerge in the coming months. 

Lord said that so far, BT's research team has overcome a "major engineering step" to prove that it is possible to wire the new fiber and use it to connect customers. However, some challenges remain-the most important of which is scaling up technology. "We have to make it travel more kilometers, which is not trivial," Lord said. "We need technical solutions to solve this problem." 

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