# Hollow-Core Fiber: Faster, Greener, but Is It Worth the Cost? — retained record > Retained news record from news:datacenterknowledge. Canonical: https://highsignal.app/data/records/ae5a39c5cedf4a21 [← sources](https://highsignal.app/data) source: [news](https://highsignal.app/data/news) (news:datacenterknowledge) published 2026-05-18 09:00 ingested 2026-05-19 09:10 [Microsoft Corporation](https://highsignal.app/entities/MSFT)[original source ↗](https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/networking/hollow-core-fiber-faster-greener-but-is-it-worth-the-cost-) ## extract Hollow-Core Fiber: Faster, Greener, but Is It Worth the Cost? Hollow-core fiber promises faster speeds and energy efficiency, but high costs and limited benefits may keep it from revolutionizing data centers. When it comes to the fiber cables that provide network connectivity to data centers, less is more. Specifically, less mass inside fiber cables translates to more bandwidth and higher transfer speeds. This has led to growing interest in hollow-core fiber, an emerging networking technology that could reshape the way data centers move information. But whether hollow-core fiber will come to a data center near you anytime soon – and whether it will actually deliver significant network performance boosts – remain open questions. Read on for perspective as we explain hollow-core fiber and its role in modern data center networking. What Is Hollow-Core Fiber? Hollow-core fiber is a type of optical fiber cable that transmits light through air or gas. It works this way because the fiber’s core is hollow space (hence the name) rather than being packed with silica, as in the case of traditional fiber-optic cable works. Light moves faster through air than through silica, and since fiber-optic cables transmit data using light waves, those that feature hollow cores can move information more quickly than traditional fiber-optic networks. Examples of hollow-core fiber during the manufacturing process. (Image: Microsoft) How Much Faster Is Hollow-Core Fiber? According to Microsoft, hollow-core fiber can increase data transmission speeds by up to 45%, while tripling maximum network bandwidth. It’s important to note, however, that these figures reflect testing in laboratory settings, rather than real-world deployments of hollow-core fiber. Note, too, that the performance rate of hollow-core fiber networks can vary depending on the exact design of the cables. Strategies such as nesting tubes inside each other within cables, and creating vacuums inside cores, can boost data transmission rates, but not all hollow-core fiber cables include these capabilities. Transmission speeds are also lower when cables span a longer geographical area – although hollow-core fiber generally performs better in this respect than traditional fiber, making it more feasible to build data centers in remote areas without compromising network performance. The Energy Benefits of Hollow-Core Fiber Alongside performance boosts, hollow-core fiber offers energy-efficiency advantages, too. This is mainly because hollow-core network infrastructure achieves lower rates of signal loss (meaning a reduction in the quality of signals as they move through a transmission medium, like fiber cable). The way that networks address signal loss is by deploying amplifiers to add intensity to light signals, but this leads to higher energy usage because amplifiers consume electricity. Thus, lower signal loss translates to a reduced need for amplification and, by extension, more energy efficiency. The Limitations of Hollow-Core Fiber While hollow-core fiber has a lot of promise, it’s also subject to some drawbacks and limitations. A big one is higher manufacturing costs. Creating cables with hollow cores is more complex than manufacturing silica-filled ones – so much so that prices for hollow-core start at approximately $600 per meter, compared to just a few dollars per meter for traditional fiber optic cable. The performance boosts of Hollow-core fiber are also limited. Latency reductions of 30-40% are significant, but they’re also not necessarily enough to be true game-changers for most use cases. Even on networks powered by hollow-core fiber, latency rates might be too high to support applications like high-frequency trading or guiding autonomous vehicles, where data needs to move almost instantaneously and latency rates of just a few milliseconds are far too high. Likewise, tripling network bandwidth – which hollow-core fiber can theoretically do – is not a bad thing, but it also doesn’t move the needle all that much. As for energy savings, hollow-core fiber is not likely to prove revolutionary in this area, either. It does significantly reduce the need for amplification, but the total energy consumption of fiber optic amplifiers on a large-scale network is typically no greater than that of two or three servers. When compared to total data center energy consumption, the energy savings of hollow-core fiber are negligible. So, the question facing the networking and data center industries is whether the performance and power advantages of hollow-core fiber over traditional fiber – which are effectively only incremental – are worth the dramatically higher costs. Who’s Using Hollow-Core Networks in Data Centers? Likely due to the high costs of hollow-core fiber, few data centers are actually leveraging it at present. The major exception is Microsoft, which has reportedly deployed hollow-core fiber for some Azure data centers. But the company hasn’t specified which ones, or stated whether hollow-core fiber has fully replaced traditional fiber in these locations or is just an experimental supplement. Beyond the data center world, some ISPs, most notably Comcast, have experimented with hollow-core fiber. But large-scale deployments appear elusive. This may change if manufacturing costs for hollow-core fiber decrease. But don’t expect hollow-core fiber to revolutionize networking in the typical data center anytime soon. ## retained text No document body was retained for this record — only its metadata was stored.