Comcast first with Lumenisity hollowcore fibre deployment

News and Business

American media company and Comcast, has announced what it believes to be the first-ever end-to-end deployment of hollowcore fibre by an ISP. The hollowcore fibre, supplied by UK-based Lumenisity, offers significantly lower latency than traditional fibres and over time will provide critical performance attributes. These fibres will help power Comcast’s network and support the delivery of multigigabit speeds through 10G.

Comcast connected two locations in Philadelphia, which enables network engineers to continue to test and observe the performance and physical compatibility of hollowcore fibre in a real-world deployment. This 40-kilometre hybrid deployment of hollowcore and traditional fibre is believed to be the longest in the world by an Internet provider. Comcast successfully tested bidirectional transmission (upstream and downstream traffic traveling on a single fibre), used coherent and direct-detect systems (allowing for forward and backward technology compatibility), and produced traffic rates ranging from 10 Gbps to 400 Gbps all simultaneously on a single strand of hollowcore fibre.

“Hollowcore fibre is a leap forward in how we deliver ultra-fast, ultra-low latency and ultra-reliable services to customers,” said Elad Nafshi, EVP & chief network officer at Comcast Cable. “As we continue to develop and deploy technology to deliver 10G, multigigabit performance to tens of millions of homes, hollowcore fibre will help to ensure that the network powering those experiences is among the most advanced and highest performing in the world.”

“We are proud to be working with Comcast on the next generation hollowcore fibre, which we believe unlocks exciting new potential for connectivity around the world,” said David Parker, executive chairman of Lumenisity.

Comcast says hollowcore fibre will help to power the next generation of ultra-low latency technologies to support network virtualisation, telemedicine, augmented and virtual reality, and other emerging services. Moving forward, the company says it is exploring opportunities to strategically deploy hollowcore fibre in select core- and access-network deployments. From 2017 to 2021, Comcast added more than 50,000 new route miles of fibre to its network and is actively building more fibre into cities and towns across the United States. Comcast’s ongoing work to expand and evolve its fibre deployments, including this hollowcore fibre deployment, will help to power Comcast’s ongoing 10G evolution, which it says will deliver reliable multigigabit upload and download speeds over the connections already installed in tens of millions of homes and businesses.

In March 2022, Lumenisity released a new generation of hollowcore fibre, DNANF®. The company said the technology has the lowest attenuation of any hollowcore fibre reported to date, and in doing so surpasses the attenuation of conventional germanium-doped single-mode fibre (SMF) in the O and C bands.

For more information, visit www.lumenisity.com