Microsoft struck a surprise deal to acquire specialized fiber provider Lumenisity for an undisclosed sum, aiming to strengthen its cloud infrastructure and better serve use cases with stringent latency and security requirements.
As part of the deal, Lumenisity’s team will apparently join Microsoft to help the company develop new networking and infrastructure solutions.
Lumenisity supplies what is known as hollow core fiber, which swaps out the glass core found in traditional fiber cabling for an air-filled center channel. The design is based around the idea that light travels faster through air than through glass and that allowing it to do so can increase speeds and reduce latency. While hollow core fiber itself is not new, Lumenisity has worked up a version of the technology which significantly reduces the loss per kilometer.
Girish Bablani, Microsoft’s Corporate VP for Azure Core, said in a blog it believes hollow core fiber can not only bolster its own infrastructure, but also benefit companies across the healthcare, financial services, manufacturing, retail and public sector spaces.
“HCF could provide enhanced security and intrusion detection for federal and local governments across the globe,” he wrote. The technology’s high-bandwidth capabilities could also “help accelerate medical image retrieval, facilitating providers’ ability to ingest, persist and share medical imaging data in the cloud,” while financial institutions could use it for “fast, secure transactions.”
Indeed, Lumenisity has drawn interest from big name companies before, including U.K. operator BT and U.S. cable giant Comcast.
BT began trialing Lumenisity’s technology in June 2021, eyeing it for mobile network deployments. In September of that year, it teamed with Lumenisity again to trial quantum key distribution over hollow core fiber, looking to beef up security.
Earlier this year, Comcast sniffed around Lumenisity’s solution as well. It tested speeds ranging from 10 Gbps to 400 Gbps over a 40-kilometer link and demonstrated that the hollow core fiber was backwards compatible. At the time, Comcast executive Elad Nafshi said Lumenisity’s fiber could be used to serve use cases ranging from financial services to telemedicine and virtual reality.
And just three months ago, euNetworks deployed a 14-kilometer stretch of Lumenisity’s hollow core fiber between London and Basildon in the U.K. to connect two data centers critical for financial trading.