Data link trial: Chinese team finds hollow-core fibre cuts lag 30% across 1,000km

Light travels through conventional optical fibres at about 200,000km per second – about two-thirds the speed it travels in a vacuum – because the signals are passing through solid glass. When vast amounts of data are exchanged between computing centres hundreds or thousands of kilometres apart, this difference amounts to a substantial delay. Now, Chinese researchers have unveiled optical fibre that replaces the solid glass core with air, cutting the data transmission delay by about 30 per cent...