Hollow Core Fibre - Nothing is better than glass for guiding light#

Steve Jones (Huber+Suhner)

• Why: Hollow-core fibre is the first genuine step-change in transmission medium in decades — guidance through air rather than glass — and it is being positioned specifically for datacentre interconnect and AI compute-cluster links, which are core DC/WAN interconnect territory.
• What: A technology primer on HCF: how it works, the performance benefits, the application space (the event page summary confirms explicit coverage of DCI and AI compute cluster usage), and — crucially — the constraints of deploying it into a market dominated by singlemode fibre and LC/APC connectors, including a proposed solution to the HCF-to-LC/APC interop conundrum.
• How: Physics-level: light guided in an air core rather than solid glass, which changes latency, nonlinearity, and loss characteristics; the talk covers what that buys operationally and where the connector/splicing ecosystem still fights the installed SMF base.
• Where applicable: DCI, low-latency backhaul, AI cluster interconnects. Vendor talk (Huber+Suhner, a connectivity supplier), but the abstract is about the technology category and its constraints rather than a product. The practical constraint — splicing, patching, and connector maturity against a singlemode-dominated plant — is the part that matters for anyone scoping an HCO deployment.