The immediate allure of hollow-core fibers is that light travels through the air inside them at 300,000 km-per-second, 50 percent faster than the 200,000 km-per-second in solid glass, cutting latency in communications. Last year, euNetworks installed the world’s first commercial hollow-core cable from Lumenisity, a commercial spinoff of Southampton, to carry traffic to the London Stock Exchange. This year, Comcast installed a 40-km hybrid cable, including both hollow-core and solid-core fiber, in Philadelphia, the first in North America. Hollow-core fiber also looks good for delivering high laser power over longer distances for precision machining and other applications.
Yes, funnily enough Microsofts reason was not HFT but AI. Essentially inter-datacentre training is limited by latency between the datacentres.
Generally they want to build the datacentres close to metro areas, by using hollow core fibre the radius of where to place the data centres has essentially increased by 3/2. This significantly reduces land acquisition costs, and supposedly MS has already made back the acquisition cost for Lumenisity, through those savings.
That feels somewhat implausible. I assume a Microsoft sized data center starts at over $100 million. Moving the footprint X miles away might be cheaper, but is probably a drop in the bucket given everything else required for a build out. I would further assume that they were already some distance away from the top tier expensive real estate to accommodate the size of the facility.
Its reality. Its generally about site and infra access, including power and fiber paths. The bigger providers (eg AWS) simply dont have more feasible sites that are within a few ms of the existing region DCs. Expect to see more infrastructure like “local zones” or AZs that are tens of ms away from the rest of the region.
By definition, it does, because the maximum speed is qualified by "the speed of light in a vacuum", so the speed of light [in other media] is simply a function of how much the medium slows it down, yet it is still the speed of light. Funny how that works!
