Category Archives: Technology

Technology Shorts March 2026

Today’s blogs looks at some of the recent breakthroughs coming out of labs and research facilities that could have practical applications that could eventually benefit the broadband industry.

Rainbow Chip. Researchers at the Columbia University School of Engineering and Applied Science have created a chip that turns a single laser beam into a “frequency comb” that produces dozens of light channels at once. As often happens in science, the breakthrough was discovered by accident when the team was working on a project related to Lidar.

Normal laser beams used in telecom are not precise and transmit a closely bunched group of similar light frequencies that scientists refer to as a messy light signal. This new chip creates multiple laser beams in a range of colors, with each beam precisely at a single light frequency. The chip output is called a comb because there is a clear gap between each different beam, so there is no interference between separate light beams. This chip could revolutionize fiber optic technology by simultaneously sending dozens of even-spaced light channels at precise frequencies through a single fiber, with no interference between colors. Scientists have created precise laser beams in the lab for research, but this chip could bring the technology into practical use.

Energy Efficient Wireless Chips. Researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder have developed a new device that could revolutionize wireless technology. The breakthrough is the creation of a surface acoustic wave (SAW) phonon laser that can create ultra-high frequency vibrations on a single chip. The new device layers silicon, piezoelectric lithium niobate, and indium gallium arsenide to amplify radio vibrations much like a diode laser amplifies light. SAW technology is already embedded in smartphones, GPS, and radar systems and is used to filter signals and reduce noise. However, today’s SAW technology  requires multiple chips and external power. The new phonon technology simplifies this to a single chip that can be powered by a battery. The new chip can also reach far higher frequencies and currently operates at about 1 gigahertz, but has a clear development path to boost this ability to tens or even hundreds of gigahertz.

Efficient Power Module. Researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory unveiled a breakthrough that could squeeze more power from existing electricity supplies. They’ve created a silicon-carbide-based power module they call ULIS (Ultra-Low Inductance Smart). The ULIS device dramatically improves the way electricity is converted and delivered inside devices. Most electronic devices contain a power module, which houses the power electronics that regulate the flow of electricity inside the device. The ULIS device is smaller and lighter while bringing up to a five times improvement in power efficiency. The device would make sense in data centers, electric grids, and any devices using next-generation electronics, like in ships and aircraft. The secret to the success of the new device is that it slows parasitic inductance by seven to nine times, which is the resistance to the process of changing or converting an electric current inside a device.

Some of the benefits come from its new design. Traditional power modules stack components inside a box-like package, while ULIS has found a way to arrange components in a two-dimensional octagon. This creates a smaller light-weight device that also minimizes magnetic interference. One of the most interesting features is that the device can be controlled wirelessly, without needing to be connected to communications cables.

ULIS is expected to impact multiple sectors. Probably the most beneficial is in the electric grid. Today, the devices in the grid require electricity to be converted into a usable form before entering every smart device in the grid. The ULIS device could make this conversion more efficiently and with less power loss in the grid.

Cooling Data Centers with Hot Water. One of the biggest challenges of large data centers is having a large supply of cool water for cooling. At CES this year, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announced the company is using water at 45 degrees Celsius (113 degrees Fahrenheit) to cool supercomputers. This is a big breakthrough because hot water doesn’t require water chillers and the accompanying power-hungry compressors. Those devices account for about 6% of the power used at a data center. This breakthrough could be a boon for two-phase liquid cooling systems. Most liquid cooling systems today circulate water, which then must be cooled before reuse. A two-phase system extracts more heat from computers by using the heat to convert the liquid to a gas and then converting back to a liquid. This is not a new technology and has been used on a limited basis for a few years, but the NVIDIA announcement will prompt data center owners to consider hot water as the primary way to cool data centers. The announcement instantly tanked the stock prices of companies that make cool-water chillers for data centers.

Low Latency AI Networks

A partnership has been announced that has the goal of creating a low-latency private Internet for AI traffic. The three partners involved are Moonshot Energy, a manufacturer of electrical and modular infrastructure for AI data centers, QumulusAI, Inc., a provider of GPU-as-a Service, and Connected Nation Internet Exchange, which has been promoting the creation of more Internet Exchanges.

The group’s goal is to initially create 25 carrier-neutral interexchange points designed to handle only low-latency traffic. The goal is to scale to 125 locations, many which would be located at major research university campuses and municipalities. The coalition has labeled the new hubs as AI Pods.

The goal of this coalition is to create a network designed specifically for AI and other data traffic that requires low latency. The network will be designed with highly efficient switches at the hub sites that will move traffic quickly. This would essentially be a private network that would isolate low-latency traffic from the large volumes of general Internet traffic that can clog up Internet hubs at busy times.

The idea of creating private networks for data is an old one. Many universities in the country are connected to the Internet2 fiber network that allows for low-cost transfer of large amounts of research and other data between universities. Many corporations have created private networks between company sites to keep corporate data traffic out of normal Internet traffic flow and to provide a higher level of security.

Tackling this as a new venture makes a lot of sense. If the companies that run the large Internet hubs  decided to somehow give priority to AI or other traffic to reduce latency, they would awaken cries about violations of network neutrality, since such behavior is exactly what network neutrality is supposed to block. If the normal Internet hubs gave priority to bits from AI data centers, then all other traffic would get a lower priority and see more problems from delays. However, a private network for AI avoids such issues by isolating AI traffic from other traffic.

The first data site for the network is scheduled for activation in July 2026, located at the campus of Wichita State University. The coalition is working towards providing dual, geographically diverse fiber routes between the new AI hubs using 400 GB transport. Each AI site would house redundant 400 GB IX ports and switches. Data centers that want to connect to the network would acquire dark fiber to one of the AI hubs.

QumulusAI says the new network would result in moving GPU computing directly to the network edge, meaning the AI network could be expanded to reach large businesses and other users of large amounts of AI data.

Connected Nation has been touting the benefits of creating more Internet hubs for a number of years. These new hubs would also become carrier-neutral locations for the interexchange of normal Internet traffic, which would lower the cost to ISPs to reach the Internet.

Technology Shorts January 2026

Sensors That Beat Lidar and Radar

The Boston startup Tarador has developed a sensor that co-founder Matt Carey says beats the performance of radar and lidar. The sensors are solid-state, meaning no moving parts, and use the terahertz band of spectrum that sits between microwaves and infrared light.

The spectrum band allows the sensors to easily pierce rain and fog. The use of higher terahertz frequencies improves the resolution of images by twenty times compared to radar. The sensors have a range of 325 yards. One of the sales points for the new sensors is a target cost to be far less than lidar. This would make the sensors a great solution for driver-assisted and self-driving cars.

Laser Cooling for Data Centers

Sandia Labs, the federally funded energy research lab, has found a way to use lasers to cool things. It’s anti-intuitive since lasers generally generate heat when they hit an object. Scientists at the lab have been working with Maxwell Labs from Minneapolis to develop the technology.

Lasers can create a cooling effect, and this has been used in the past to chill antimatter and to study quantum phenomena. How does this work? Lasers tuned to a specific frequency and targeted at a small area on the surface of a certain element can cool it instead of heating it. Small means an area in the order of hundreds of microns. The technology would utilize a photonic cold plate with components a thousand times smaller than the width of a human hair that would channel the cooling lasers. The cold plate would be composed of a millimeter-thick plate of pure gallium arsenide. The scientists believe this can bring as much cooling as the current method of circulating water close to chips. This would be a huge breakthrough since 30% to 40% of the cost of operating a data center is used for cooling. This could also extend the life of chips, which tend to burn out in two years under data center loads.

A Chip that Can Stream Thoughts

A team from Columbia University, New York Presbyterian Hospital, Stanford University, and the University of Pennsylvania has collaborated to create a tiny brain implant that could significantly change how people interact with computers.

The brain implant is called a Biological Interface System to Cortex (BISC). The power of this technology is the small size, since the BISC is thinner than a human hair, along with the ability to transmit large amount of data. The implant is a big improvement over current technologies because it is controlled by a single small chip that can be easily implanted inside the skull.

One of the benefits of the BISC implant is the ability to treat conditions like epilepsy, spinal cord injuries, ALS, strokes, and blindness. The chip can hopefully create a communication pathway to the brain to help restore motor, speech, and visual abilities.

Like all new technologies, this could also power other uses, like creating an interface between humans and computers. This team was not focused on that goal, but this is another technology step forward in brain/computer interfaces, a goal of scientists over the last decade.

Network Timing

One element that is key to all networks rarely gets discussed. Network timing (or network clocks) involves hardware or processes to make sure that all parts of a network are in synch.

Timing and synchronization are critical for network services that depend on precise, synchronized timing on network devices. Accurate and reliable synchronization of any network device helps manage the security, availability, and efficiency of the network devices. Timing is essential for the function of telephone, cellular, and broadband networks.

There are multiple kinds of timing in use.

Frequency Synchronization. This makes sure that all electronics inside a network operate using the same clock rate or frequency. Many kinds of network gear come with built-in clocks, and having different parts of a network using different clocks will result in data loss, corruption, or misinterpretation of bits. Frequency synchronization forces all of the clocks inside the network to operate in unison by matching the frequency of each clock to a source clock. There are different sources for frequency synchronization:

  • Synchronous Ethernet (SyncE) chooses one clock and forces the other clocks to match.
  • Networks can be synchronized to external clocks such as BITS or the GPS satellites. BITS can choose any reliable external clock.
  • Many networks use Precision Time Protocol (PTP), which eliminates the danger of losing the connection to an external clock.
  • A network can use a free-running internal oscillator chip that holds an accurate clock.

Many networks have used GPS for frequency synchronization. A GPS satellite carries a highly stable atomic clock that provides precise time signals, which can be converted into frequency references by a GPS receiver. While the atomic clock provides highly precise time and frequency information, GPS is not as reliable when there isn’t a clear view of the sky during weather events.

Phase Synchronization makes sure that the phase of network signal is consistent throughout the network. Phase refers to a specific point in time on a waveform cycle. Phase synchronization ensures that electronics agree on the timing of the start and end of each bit in a data stream. This is critical in applications where data from multiple sources have to be combined or compared, such as in a cellular network.

Time Synchronization, also called Time of Day (ToD) ensures that all electronics agree on the current time, which is critical in applications where timing is crucial. Networks differ in the need for precise time. Network Time Protocol (NTP) can be used to provide millisecond accuracy, while PTP can provide nanosecond accuracy along with phase synchronization.

A New Security Risk

A new security risk has recently been brought to my attention. I was on a Teams call that included an attorney who would not let the call continue while an AI notetaker was present. His comment was that the notetaker is listening to everything that is said, transmitting everything verbatim to a data center somewhere in the cloud. He said he was aghast that people would hold meetings about sensitive topics and then give everything that was said to unknown parties outside of the call. He used the analogy that having an AI notetaker is the equivalent of inviting a reporter into a meeting.

It didn’t take much research to realize he is right. An AI notetaker records everything that is said in a meeting so that AI servers somewhere in the cloud can make a transcript or summary of the meeting. Every word said in a meeting, from the brilliant to the mundane, is sent to a data center out of the control of the people on the call.

There is no way to know what the folks who control the recording will do. At a minimum, it’s almost certain they are using the data to further train AI models, which are voracious for more data. A record of the meeting could be sold to others. It’s possible, and even likely, that somebody really good at AI prompts can figure out what is discussed at a corporate meeting.

Of course, the AI notetaker companies can all swear that they don’t use the data for purposes other than making a summary of the meeting. But I have to ask, does anybody have the slightest idea of the identity of the people who own and work at these businesses, and do you trust them? Nobody would let an unknown stranger into a work meeting, but that’s exactly what companies are doing with AI notetakers. But suddenly, companies have begun willingly sharing conversations with the cloud that they might not even want to share with everybody else inside their company. It’s hard to see this as anything but a self-inflicted data breach.

Before writing this blog, I asked a few people about this. One friend who is an AI expert said that it would be too tempting for anybody in this kind of business to monetize the data they are gathering by selling it to others to train AI models. He said that most AI companies are struggling to be profitable, and that secondary revenue streams have to be tempting (just as it is tempting for ISPs to sell user data). He thought that it’s too expensive for companies to routinely sift through the data for tidbits of corporate espionage, but that it would be possible for anybody willing to spend the processing time, or who is interested in a specific business or a specific person. He also said he would be worried that AI companies could be using the data to gather a voice print of meeting participants, something that they might otherwise have a hard time finding for most people.

I don’t have any knowledge that the companies in this line of business are doing anything nefarious with the data gathered, and perhaps they are not. But letting key information out of a closed circle of people on a call is practically the definition of a security risk. There is no way to know if this might harm a business.

There are a few companies that sell notetakers that say that they keep all data on a user’s computer and don’t share it in the cloud. The AI engine that summarizes a call is still going to be in the cloud, so unless that can be proven somehow, that still feels like a risk. Tech companies have been lying to the public about how they use the data they gather since AOL and early web companies figured out how to monetize user data.

This is one of the oddest blogs I’ve ever written because it makes me wonder if I’m being paranoid. But that feeling is probably a sign that this is a real concern.

Broadband in a Hurry

There is an interesting new twist on wireless backhaul. The Swedish company TERASi has developed a wireless backhaul technology that enables networks to be configured on the fly. The company has developed a small, lightweight, portable microwave radio that can quickly be mounted anywhere on a tripod, a pole, or any object with line-of-sight to a neighboring radio.

The radios use frequencies in the 70 GHz range. They can provide 2 Gbps in bandwidth for up to 5 miles or 10 Gbps for a few miles. Latency is a super-low 5 milliseconds.

The selling point for these portable radios is that they can be installed and configured in minutes. This is due to the small size of 3x3x1 inches. The company says a radio can be mounted on a photography tripod or even on a drone to create a quick wireless link. The small radios are being touted as a solution for quick links in the field for the military or for a quick link any time an ISP needs a quick connection.

The radios are now in beta testing mode, and the company would like to hear from ISPs or local governments that might have a unique use case for radios that can create a quick link.

It’s not hard to imagine numerous uses for a microwave network that can be installed quickly.

  • The company is marketing this to the military as an alternative to using Starlink on the battlefield. There have been several times in Ukraine where the Starlink network went down – at least once intentionally, and once recently when Starlink had a worldwide outage. Microwave radios are safe from interference since it’s nearly impossible to intercept the tiny beam between two devices. These radios also have the upside of delivering higher bandwidth than satellite.
  • The technology could be a boon for disaster recovery. ISPs and utilities could string together a backhaul network that would allow them to reestablish a quick bandwidth link to substations, cell towers, or powered electronics hubs. The devices could be in place quickly to establish connections for critical first responders. Local governments could use the radios to power public hotspots to give quick connectivity to the public.
  • These radios could be an instant patch for damaged networks, particularly in situations where repairs will be slow. These radios could be a quick fix for fiber cuts in places that are hard to fix, like bridges and railroad crossings. The radios could leapfrog landslides, fire, or flooded areas to keep a network functioning.
  • Temporary wireless networks make sense for places like construction sites that need bandwidth today, but not permanently.
  • Commercial firms might consider this as a quick fix between nearby buildings for emergency redundancy.

The downside is the expense of buying units that might never be used. But the huge upside is having the ability to create a quick broadband connection for emergencies and critical needs.

A New Major Telecom Vendor

Many folks in the industry will already recognize Amphenol, the company that is poised to become one of the major new vendors in the industry. The company has decided to grow quickly by acquisition. It recently purchased the Connectivity and Cable Solutions subsidiary from CommScope for $10.5 billion. Amphenol also bought Trexon, a cable assembly business, for $1 billion.

Amphenol is a worldwide business with manufacturing facilities in forty countries. The company is in a wide range of markets, including military-aerospace, industrial, automotive, information technology, mobile phones, wireless infrastructure, broadband, medical, and pro audio. The largest division of Amphenol is Amphenol Aerospace (formerly Bendix Corporation).

In the telecom world, Amphenol Fiber Systems International (AFSI) was started in 1993 to manufacture fiber optic connectivity products and systems in Allen, Texas. In July 2024, Amphenol purchased two subsidiaries from CommScope. The company paid $2.1 billion to buy the Outdoor Wireless Networks (OWN) and the Distributed Antenna Systems (DAS) business. Amphenol also resurrected the Andrew Corporation brand name, a company previously acquired by CommScope, that manufactures tower and rooftop systems and cable management accessories.

Amphenol’s acquisitions are not just focused on telecom, and recent acquisitions include Carlisle Interconnect Technologies (CIT) which makes antennas and sensors for harsh environments; Lutze, a railway technology company; LifeSync, a manufacturer of connectors, antennas, and sensors for the medical industry; Narda-MITEQ, a maker of RF and microwave equipment for the military; XMA, a manufacturer of passive microwave components; and Q Microwave, which specializes in RF filters and subsystems for the military and space sectors.

The many acquisitions have already boosted 2025 earnings for the first half of the year. The strategic acquisitions contributed 15% to the first half of 2025 revenues. On a reported basis, revenues jumped 52% and excluding acquisition-related contributions, organic growth was 37% to hit $10.46 billion. In second-quarter 2025, revenues jumped 57% year over year on a reported basis and 41% organically to $5.65 billion.

The acquisition of CommScope’s fiber business makes Amphenol a major player in the broadband business. This puts Amphenol in competition with companies like Corning, Belden, and Prysmian. The company is also hoping for a big boost from selling fiber to supply the current AI explosion.

The CommScope sale might surprise some, but the company was in trouble due to a massive debt load of over $7 billion, and slower-than-expected sales that led to inventory build-ups in its broadband and cable access segments.

Space Shorts September 2025

Space has been a part of the communications networks since the communications satellite Telstar was first put into orbit in 1962. I remember as a kid tracking Telstar across the sky. Space today is an increasingly important part of communications. The following are a few pieces of space news I recently found to be interesting..

Low-Orbit LEO. The Spanish startup Kreios Space is working to develop a new type of satellite that can fly at lower altitudes. LEO satellites today typically fly at altitudes from 220 to 350 miles above the Earth. Kreios is working on satellites that would fly at an altitude of 125 miles. LEO satellites for companies like Starlink are parked high enough to avoid the drag caused by the upper atmosphere. Kreios would be able to fly lower by using air intake to drive electric motors that would generate enough thrust to maintain altitude. This would allow for long-duration orbits and the ability to move the satellite without needing any traditional fuel.

It’s not hard to understand the advantage of flying at lower altitudes. The satellites would be able to observe the ground in much greater detail. Communications and broadband satellites at a lower altitude would mean lower latency and faster communications times.  The company thinks the improvement in performance would be between 3 and 16 times better than the current LEO satellites flying at higher altitudes.

 Bluetooth Satellites. Hubble Network is a startup that is building a fleet of satellites to communicate with Bluetooth devices. The Bluetooth devices involved are different than the typical Bluetooth device that is designed to send a lot of data for a short distance. Instead, Hubble will connect to low-power Bluetooth sensors that only transmit a small amount of data. Hubble launched its first two satellites in 2024, now has seven satellites in orbit, and plans on having a full satellite constellation in place by 2028.

The advantage of the technology for Hubble customers is the use of low-power Bluetooth devices that are far less costly than connecting to cellular technology. Sensors can be placed anywhere on the planet that are out of reach of cellular networks and can be used for functions like tracking the movement of cargo ships. Hubble is already tracking millions of devices and expects to be able to keep track of billions. The company today is working with customers like Life360, which has a location-based safety service that can let families and friends share real-time locations with each other. The sensors can be used to track vehicle fleets and can provide instant feedback on things like driving speeds.

 Space Robots. I can’t think of a space sci-fi movie that didn’t have worker robots in the background taking care of the maintenance required to work in space. I saw an article about Icarus, a startup that is raising money to develop robot workers to replace astronauts on the ISS space station. That set me on a search to understand the space robotics market, and there is a space robot-race underway. Established companies like Maxar Technologies, Northrup Grumann, NDA, Honeybee Robotics, and Motiv Space Systems have been active in the field. They are joined by numerous startups, including Astrobotic Technology, GITAI, Rovial Space, BigDipper Exploration Technologies, Space 11, and Novium.

We’ve already seen space robots for many years, like the various Mars rovers like Nasa’s Sojourner, Spirit, Opportunity, Curiosity, and Perseverance, and China’s Zhurong. The companies listed are working on robots of all sizes, from the inchworm robots being developed GITAI to moon rovers being developed by several companies.

Asteroid Mining. There have now been several trips to explore asteroids and bring back samples. This includes NASA’s OSIRIS-Rex mission that returned samples from the Bennu asteroid in 2023 and the Japanese Hayabusa-2 mission, which returned samples from the Ryugu asteroid in 2020. These missions were government-funded and cost hundreds of millions of dollars, and were funded for scientific research purposes.

Startup Karman+ is working on being able to fund a round trip to asteroids for roughly $10 million, with the cost to hopefully drop in the future. This is the first step in developing an asteroid mining industry that would use robots to mine valuable metals from asteroids and round-trip rockets to ferry materials back to Earth orbit. This first mission only plans to bring back one kilogram of material and is a test of concept for the technology. The ultimate technology will need to mine the materials in space needed to create the fuel needed to return heavier payloads back to Earth.

Broadband Technology Improving

As has happened continuously since the introduction of DSL and 1 Mbps cable modems, the major broadband technologies continue to evolve and get faster.

Cable HFC technology is getting faster. Harmonic, one of the makers of core cable broadband technology, recently announced that the company had achieved a 14 Gbps speed with DOCSIS 4.0. The test was achieved during a CableLabs interoperability event. The speed was achieved in a mock-up that included achieving the faster speed using technology provided by multiple other vendors.

The test was achieved with an updated CMTS (which is the main hub router in a cable modem network). The speed beats the old record of 10 Gbps, also achieved by Harmonic. It’s unlikely that any cable companies will try to achieve that speed since it would mean sacrificing some upload speeds with current DOCSIS 4.0 technology. But a faster CMTS would allow a cable company to offer a true 10 Gbps download product. These kinds of breakthroughs are also important since they are the first step towards developing the next generation of electronics.

Faster home broadband service from fiber is also improving. Earlier this year, Nokia announced the availability of two different 25 Gbps customer modems, making it realistic for ISPs to offer the faster 25 Gbps service on a PON fiber network.

Nokia also recently announced the release of a 25G PON card for the network core that can simultaneously support all of the flavors of PON, including GPON, XGS-PON, and 25G PON. The company said the card would easily be able to handle the upcoming 50G PON. Having a core with this flexibility will allow ISPs to keep customers on older GPON technology without having to force an update when the newer technologies are introduced to the network.

Finally, Nokia announced the release of some new home WiFi 7 gateways for the home. The  Beacon 4 gateway can reach speeds of 3.6 Gbps, and the tri-band Beacon 9 gateway offers 9.4 Gbps speeds. These are added to a line of gateways that top out with the Beacon 24, which can achieve home WiFi speeds of 24 Gbps. The new generation of WiFi 7 routers offers the possibility of superfast speeds inside the home using 6 GHz spectrum, while at the same time still connecting to older devices using 2.5 and 5 GHz spectrum.

Another major announcement is the new generation of Tarana radios for fixed wireless. The specifications on the new radios are a leap forward in capacity and performance. The first-generation G1 radio platform could support up to 1,000 customers per tower, 250 per sector. Each sector could accept up to 2.5 gigabits of backhaul bandwidth. The new G2 platform can support up to 512 customers per sector (2048 for a tower). The radios can accept as much as 6 gigabits of backhaul bandwidth per sector.

We can’t leave out satellite technology. The first-generation Starlink satellite weighed around 570 pounds and had a total downlink budget of about 20 Gbps. Starlink is introducing its third generation of satellite that weighs almost 4,200 pounds and has a downlink budget of 1 Tbps and 160 Gbps in aggregate uplink capacity.

This is a sampling of technology improvements and is not meant to exclude improvements being introduced by other vendors. There are many other important improvements including faster lasers for long-haul fiber routes and point-to-point broadband connections using light.

Multi-core Fiber

There is a relatively new fiber technology that most readers will not have heard about. Multi-core fiber (MCF) is a technology that packs multiple strands of fiber inside a bundle that is about the same size as a single strand of fiber today. The benefit of packing more fibers into a tiny strand is obvious – it means a lot more bandwidth can be sent through a single physical strand of fiber.

It may surprise you to understand that only a small fraction of a strand of fiber is used to transmit light. In today’s fiber, the light path in the center of a fiber is tiny and represents only 0.5% of area of a cross-section of a fiber. The rest of the fiber strand is made up of materials surrounding the glass that help to keep the light on a straight path and cladding that protects the fiber. Fiber could be made a lot thinner, but the industry has standardized on a fiber strand of 125 microns because going any smaller makes it hard for technicians to handle a single fiber strand. This means there is a lot of unused real estate inside a 125-micron sheath for additional light paths.

Early prototypes of multi-core fiber have created fibers with 7, 12, and 19 fibers, with the possibility of getting even more cores into a single strand. Each core is equivalent to a single-strand of fiber today. A 24-strand cable that uses 12-core multi-core fiber would contain 288 separate fiber paths. Future networks using multi-core fibers will be lighter and easier to handle than the fibers they would replace using current technologies.

There are some obvious issues with using multi-core fibers. One is cost, and MCF fiber is a lot more expensive today than traditional fiber. But that difference might be eliminated if MCF fiber becomes common and is produced in volume. The extra cost of the fiber might be easily offset by the increased ease of working with smaller fiber bundles. There are major challenges of splicing an MCF fiber into an existing network comprised of single-strand fiber. MCF fiber also interfaces in a whole new way with fiber electronics. There is also a size issue, because MCF fibers with a lot of cores will be larger than 125 microns, meaning that all new tools are needed to work with the fiber.

There are already a few trials of MCF fiber in use. This is a natural improvement for undersea fibers, where getting the most bandwidth possible in a fiber bundle is desired. There is also MCF fiber installed in some data centers to facilitate moving huge amounts of data from device to device.

Multiple vendors are manufacturing or testing multi-core fiber and it will become more available over time. This seems like a natural upgrade to long-haul fiber routes between major cities. There has been a lot of industry concern that the explosion of data centers means these long-haul routes are filling up soon after being constructed. MCF fiber multiplies the bandwidth that can be delivered through existing conduits.

One of the concerns of having many tightly packed cores side-by-side is crosstalk and interference between cores. However, scientists seem to have solved this problem with good shielding materials around each core.

It may be a long time before this makes sense in last-mile networks. We can already deliver far more bandwidth than almost any customer needs with current fiber technology. However, MCF answers the question of whether fiber technology will ever be obsolete. No wireless technology will ever be able to outcompete a small MCF fiber strand with multiple cores in each small fiber strand.