Latest Development of Optical Fiber Communication Technology

1. hollow fiber technology to achieve commercial breakthrough
1, Shenzhen-Hong Kong financial line application.
China Mobile officially commercialized the country's first anti-resonant air-core optical fiber with completely independent intellectual property rights in Shenzhen. It was applied to the data transmission of Shenzhen-Hong Kong Stock Exchange. The cross-border two-way delay was reduced to nearly 1 millisecond, and the optical fiber loss was only 0.09dB/km (the lowest record for commercial optical fiber in the world), providing key support for high-frequency trading.
2. Scale Promotion Plan
The industry chain is focusing on the optimization of preparation process costs (such as pipe pulling, low-loss welding), engineering stability improvement, and planning to data center interconnection, long-distance trunk lines, intelligent computing clusters and other scenarios to expand replication.
2. Special Optical Fiber Accelerates Industrialization Layout
1. Multimode/air-core fiber expansion
Hengtong Optoelectronics started the 200-mu AI Advanced Optical Fiber Material Research and Development and Manufacturing Center, focusing on expanding the production of ultra-low loss hollow fiber, multi-core fiber and high-performance multimode fiber. Upon completion in 2026, it will strengthen the delivery capability of the global high-power optical fiber connection scheme.
2, multimode fiber demand surge
Driven by AI computing power, the demand for multimode fiber will increase by 138 percent year-on-year in 2024 and is expected to increase by 77% in 5 (26% compound annual growth rate in 2025). Its bending performance and low-cost advantages are suitable for short-distance high-speed transmission in data centers.
3. ultra-low-loss fiber scale deployment speeds up
1, G.654.E optical fiber into the mainstream of the trunk line
China's ultra-low-loss fiber (G.654.E) has been deployed in 2023 over 35000 leather kilometers, 2024 continued to release. Its large effective area characteristics significantly inhibit nonlinear effects, support 400G/800G ultra-high-speed long-distance transmission, and become the core material of the national backbone network upgrade.
2. Increase in industry maturity
Changfei, Hengtong, Fiberhome and other enterprises to achieve technological autonomy, the three major operators scale procurement to promote the maturity of the industrial chain.
4. Multi-core Fiber Breaks Capacity Limit
1. Long-distance transmission record refresh
Japan's NICT uses 19-core random coupling fiber to achieve 1.02 Pb/s rate +1808km transmission (capacity distance product 889 Pbps × km).
The coupled 12-core optical fiber jointly developed by NEC and NTT achieves 7280km error-free transmission (single-core 1.2 Tb/s).
2. Technical optimization direction
Through the cyclic core replacement (CCP) technology, the crosstalk between cores is suppressed, the complexity of MIMO-DSP processing is reduced, and the practical feasibility is improved.
5. Standard Evolution and Ecological Expansion
1, hollow fiber international standard construction accelerated
China Mobile jointly promotes the standardization of hollow fiber design, testing and system architecture, and opens up the whole chain of "fiber-device-algorithm.
2, integration of application scenarios to deepen
The new optical fiber technology has gradually penetrated into the high-precision fields such as low-altitude intelligent networking, ocean communication, star-ground interconnection, etc., supporting the construction of the "east-west calculation" computing power network base.