Hello everyone and welcome back to the Cognixia podcast! we talk about a major infrastructure innovation called the Hollow Core Fiber. As technology evolves, it requires the infrastructure supporting it to evolve as well, to keep up with the demands of the change. In this AI era, large scale computing is becoming an everyday thing and it is impossible to carry this out without strong, resilient, and foolproof infrastructure to support it. This is what could be called ‘Purpose-Built Infrastructure’. This can’t happen by just picking up a bunch of hardware and dumping it at a data center somewhere in the world, can it? That’s not how scientific breakthroughs and innovations really happen, do they?

At the Microsoft Ignite event in November 2023, a vey revolutionary technology came to everyone’s attention. This tech was called the hollow core fiber. It is an innovative optical fiber that can revolutionize global cloud infrastructure by not just offering superior quality but also improved latency and a more secure data transmission.

The hollow core fiber technology or HCF uses a proprietary design where light propagates in the air core of a hollow fiber. The cores of traditional fibers are made of optical glass, hence the name optical glass fiber or optical fiber. The HCF offers advantages over this traditional optical fiber.

But how do you prevent light leakage in a hollow core fiber and how do you ensure that the light keeps moving ahead in a straight path?

Well, the structure of the hollow core fiber has nested tubes that help reduce any unwanted light leakage and that also ensures that the light keeps moving ahead in a straight path through the hollow core.

If you go back to your high school physics class, you will remember that light travels faster through air than through glass. This helps the hollow core fiber to be about 47% faster than the standard silica glass. This, in turn, leads to much faster speeds and much lower latency when using the HCF. The HCF would also offer much higher bandwidth per fiber.