Amazon Deploying Hollow Core Fibre In Its 400G Backbone Long Haul Network

Amazon's North American fibre optic network below. Its global network consists of nine million kilometers of owned fibre pairs. Amazon spent the last year experimenting with hollow core fibre and is now ready to join Microsoft in long haul deployments. See their blog for more setails: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws-insights/building-resilience-inside-awss-nine-million-kilometers-of-fiber-optic-cabling/. Microsoft has deployed hollow core fibre in the long haul to connect three AI data centres. It owns the leading hollow core manufacturer and research company, Lumenisity. 

New hollow core designs unveiled in a recent Nature Photonics paper have solved the main obstacle to long haul deployment, namely high attenuation. High attenuation simply means light pulses fade rapidly and hence require frequent amplification. In contrast, Luminisity's new hollow core design unveiled in the Nature publication has 50% less attenuation than standard fibre. This means it can be incorporated into existing terrestrial long haul networks.

Benefits Of the New Improved Hollow Core Fibre

  • Attenuation of .1db or better per kilometer versus .14db for standard commercial solid core fibre. This alone sharply increases repeater hut spans and reduces the number required. Fewer repeater sites means less construction costs and operating expenses. 

  • Latency reduction of 30% due to the faster speed of light through air versus silicon. 

  • A 5x to 10x long term bandwdith increase as hollow core fibre can use not only C+L bands, but also O,E,S, and U bands. These bands will require new amplifier designs as existing erbium doped amplifiers only work well in the C band. 

  • Hollow core has little to no chromatic and polar dispersion. So less need for expensive forward error correction and other digital signal processing technologies. The bottom line is more robust and cheaper DWDM equipment and transponders. 

  • See the breakthrough Nature Photonics article for the complete picture: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41566-025-01747-5.
  • Next steps include greater production to drive down per unit costs and training field techicians in splicing and handling hollow core. 




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