UK's BT starts trials of new hollow-core optical fibre networks

Frickin' lasers

> "and an ability to withstand higher power levels, making them well-suited for use with lasers."

I designed fibre optic transmitters in the early 80s and even then we only used laser diode emitters for telco equipment. Have they been using anything else for long haul since then?

At the time, T1 (1.5 Mb/s) was commercially available with T3 (45Mb/s) as the goal for new telco products. By the time I moved on we were building specialized 50 Mb/s local fibre networks (Hubnet) and trying and compete with Token ring and 10Mb/s Ethernet.

Cool...

So another amazing technology coming our way that we'll access through a shitty Intel Puma powered doorstop.

...and after the bean counters get involved it'll be all bog roll tubes and maglites to save money.

High-frequency trading

If there is an advantage to hollow fibers HFT companies will be the first to move

Good stuff but Adastral - really? Having visited the place several times, the teams there, whilst good, don't see the full operational practicalities. Hollow fibre - how will that manage with line breaks or damage? Assume the core of the cable around the hollow fibre is strengthened to avoid damage.

Meanwhile, the OpenReach team can't even update my cabinet in the centre of town, meaning no one in the street can get fast Internet (despite speed promises, it was only ~5Mbit/s). We have the choice of Starlink or Virgin Media. Both are much more expensive.

All we get is this;

We're sorry, our fibre products aren't available for you yet.

We don’t have plans to upgrade your area yet to our fibre services, but you may still be able to get our Standard copper products - check with your provider of choice.

We're upgrading over 20 million homes and businesses over the next decade to our Ultrafast Full Fibre network, giving speeds of up to 1Gbps.

We update our build plans every three months, so provide your details and we'll keep you up to date if anything changes.

Also, why not consider our Community Fibre Partnership programme to see if you could get Full Fibre sooner?

:-(

Competition from Starnet et al

Having watched and competed with BT. Their policy is to sweat legacy systems as long a possible, while giving lip service to government policy.

They are only ramping up FTTx because they are worried about competitors.

e.g. The LEO stuff, could be faster than traditional terrestrial, taking the premium market, so beloved of BT.

That they wave the Union Jack to get tax payer money to do what any normal business would have to get investors for is particularly galling, to us innovators.

Hey Ho, Nothing changes in big business and politics

An edge over altnets?

Although hollow-core fibre has yet to see any extensive real-world deployments, its use might provide BT with an edge in the face of newfound rivalry from alternative fibre networks (commonly known as altnets).

I hardly think so. Altnets like HyperOptic, CityFibre and B4RN are either successful because they provide >1Mb service to places OpenReach aren't/won't go, or because they restrict themselves to multi-tenant buildings which already have a distribution point in the basement, making rollout cheaper.

Whether your connection is via solid or hollow core is entirely irrelevant for the 99.99th percentile of consumers and businesses. Hypothetically, if the premises are a full 5km from the nearest active equipment, swapping conventional fibre (at 0.7c) for a magic product which manages a full 1c would save you all of 4μs of latency. Nobody is picking BT vs. altnet based on that - they'll just pick the cheapest provider at their chosen speed point (and then fail to get decent performance anyway because their wireless is horribly congested).

Neat tech though and very interesting for the high frequency trading crowd, along with anyone in the business of long-distance backhaul. Chasing latency improvements becomes very worthwhile on a 4,000km trans-ocean link, and lower attenuation plus a tolerance of higher input power could reduce the number of mid-cable repeater segments required, lowering costs on submarine cables.

Hollow as Openrech [sic] does best...

Yes it's me again, Mark from Manchester on behalf of those who live in close proximity to city centres who don't have even fibre to the cabinet let alone to the premises.

Soke to an OR engineer yesterday who confirmed my cab (street cabinet) did not have fibre connected. He reckoned OR had "missed it out", not his fault.

So before you stuck up incompetent fuckers at Openreach start banging on about "Hollow" fibre try stop making hollow promises giving 2nd class excuses and third rate service.

Here's my postcode M40 7AZ. Come round and sort your shoddy inept network out. I won't hold my breath.