Lumenisity is a UK startup developing a new kind of fibre technology, which claims to reduce optical latency by 50%.

The company was spun out of the University of Southampton and came out of stealth mode last autumn. It hasn’t taken long for it to catch the eye of major telcos, with BT partnering with Mavenir to conduct trial at its Adastral Park labs. Hollowcore fibre has a tube of air running through the centre of the glass, which offers superior propagation characteristics that in turn promise benefits such as low latency, and lower network costs due to the need for fewer exchanges.

“We’re excited to begin trialling hollow core fibre and to discover the potential opportunities and benefits of deploying this technology in certain scenarios,” said Professor Andrew Lord, BT’s Head of Optical Network Research. “This new type of fibre cable could play an important role in the future of the world’s communications infrastructure, heralding a step-change in capability and speed, to keep up with the demands for high-speed, low latency communications driven by 5G networks, streaming, and more.”

“Lumenisity is delighted to be the supplier of field deployable CoreSmart hollowcore cable for these trials with BT,” said Mike Fake, Lumenisity’s Director responsible for Product Management. “This is further evidence of the impact our unique low loss, high performing cables can have on the networks operated by our carrier partners.”

It’s good to see two UK companies collaborating to potentially raise the technological bar for the telecoms industry worldwide. If hollowcore fibre does what is claimed of it then fixed networks and backhaul could be improved by an order of magnitude. For that to happen there would still be the small matter of replacing all existing fibre, however.