Faster light, smarter networks, and the crews behind them
What’s coming to fiber and telecom, one span at a time.
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Lead story
Hollow core fiber goes live in central London
Colt, Network Planning Solutions (NPS) and Relativity Networks have completed a hollow core fiber proof of concept connecting two Colt network locations in central London, and the link is now live within Colt’s infrastructure. Instead of carrying light through glass, the fiber uses an air-filled core, which Colt says reduces latency by around 30%. NPS led the installation and validation. Its CEO said the team “successfully installed, spliced, tested and validated” the fiber inside a complex, established metro network. Colt expects hollow core to be used on the most performance-critical routes, such as links between data centers, AI clusters, cloud regions and trading locations, rather than replacing conventional fiber everywhere.
Quick hits
Orange Spain says its staff have built more than 1,000 AI agents.
In an expansion of its Google Cloud partnership (announced Oct 8), Orange Spain said employees have built more than 1,000 custom agents on Gemini Enterprise. Uses include sorting and routing technical incidents and analyzing system logs to isolate the source of network or service disruptions.
A fiber gateway that tries to diagnose itself.
At Network X, Airoha and MediaTek showed a 50G-PON gateway chip with an AI agent that runs on the gateway or ONU. A customer describes the problem in plain language, and the agent uses device data to find the cause and suggest or carry out a safe fix. Airoha says 50G-PON offers up to 5x the speed of XGS-PON (vendor claim).
Ordering interconnection by talking to an agent.
DE-CIX released a beta MCP server that lets AI agents find, order and manage its connectivity services from plain language instructions. Its CTO cited a DE-CIX survey finding that IT teams spend more than 11 hours a week troubleshooting connectivity.
Huawei pitches AI-led network upkeep, down to the fiber break.
At Network X, Huawei optical president Bob Chen outlined a plan to build networks around AI data centers and to run maintenance in three tiers. Software self-heals some client issues, engineers fix configuration faults remotely with diagnostic assistants, and crews sent out for damaged fiber use copilot software to locate the cable fault. Huawei says automated line adjustments cut optical line terminal energy use by more than 20% (vendor claim).
Field angle
Two threads run through this issue. New glass is arriving: hollow core fiber made it into a live metro network, and its own installers point out that a specialist crew installed, spliced and tested it. AI is moving deeper into network operations too, from gateways that check themselves to agents that triage incidents. Even Huawei’s model for automated maintenance ends with a person in a truck when the fiber itself is damaged; the software helps find the break, and a crew still fixes it. The more automated the network gets, the more the remaining field work is the part that can’t be skipped.
From X
@spliceflow asks: Hollow core is going in on the most latency-sensitive routes. Would you want to be on the crew that splices it? Reply on X.
The Next Span is written by the team at SpliceFlow. spliceflow.app
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