October 15, 2025
When Vint Cerf, one of the fathers of the internet, was asked to predict the internet’s future at Convergence India in 1999, he famously said “Well, they say a year in the internet business is like a dog year – equivalent to seven years in a regular person's life,” later adding, “I feel as if I'm living in a science fiction story. I have to pinch myself.”
Back then, TiVo was an emerging technology. It revolutionized the TV viewing experience and took 1,680 days to reach one million early adopters. OpenAI unleashed ChatGPT in 2022 and reached that many subscribers in just five days, which was the very definition of unprecedented until the company’s CEO, Sam Altman, went on record saying the number of users doubled in “just a few weeks” earlier this year. Cerf, in his current role as VP & chief internet evangelist at Google, appeared on an April 2025 episode of the DisrupTV podcast to discuss the transition from the Age of the Internet to the Age of AI. On AI, he remarked “there's no doubt in my mind that these are becoming increasingly powerful tools for accelerating our ability to do things … It's hard to believe that so much has happened over the past 50 years and there's so much more to go.”
So Much More Bandwidth
The precise use cases for how AI will ultimately be put into use across specific business sectors is unknown – just as we could not accurately predict the internet’s upcoming “killer apps” in 1999. What we do know is as true today as it was then: the right amount of bandwidth needs to be in the right place at the right time to enable any new technologies to emerge.
In the past two to three years, the telecom industry has seen a 2-3x increase in the number of physical, optical connections required in networks to enable AI and machine learning workloads. For today’s next-gen, ultra-high-bandwidth data centers, the increase is tenfold; each NVIDIA super pod within AI-factory environments could take 16k to 17k cables to handle the architecture’s machine-to-machine connectivity demands.
Physical Pathways Cannot Grow with Demand
Growth is a major theme, both for accelerating adoption of new tech and the exponential increase in physical lanes required by high-speed GPUs within AI pods. However, data center designers cannot endlessly add more physical pathways or jam more traditional cables in space-constricted environments.
Similarly, cable manufacturers cannot solve the bandwidth challenge by endlessly adding more traditional optical fibers into their cable designs. Certainly, it can be done; Sumitomo Electric Lightwave has achieved 10k fibers in a single-tube cable in our factory but found it requires extra care to use and is not a sustainable solution for our customers.
Multicore Fiber is the Answer
The ongoing growth in bandwidth demand ultimately cannot be supplied by traditional fibers. The telecom industry collectively needs to evolve how cable is designed, manufactured, and terminated for networks of the future. Specifically, end-to-end solutions for space-division multiplexing with multicore fibers (MCF), combined with co-packaged optics (CPO) and wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) technology, is the answer for long-term scalability and sustainability.
Whereas traditional optical fibers each have a single core, MCF technology exponentially increases each fiber’s bandwidth potential by a factor of two, four, or more. The benefits are transformative. Not a new technology, MCF has long proven its value and reliability as a mature, standardized solution in subsea applications, where it is prized for dramatically reducing cabling’s outer diameter (OD) 40-60 percent vs. traditional cables. In next-gen data center deployments, MCF technology shows tremendous promise that we are steadfastly pursing hand-in-hand with our industry partners.
A Word on Latency
In tandem with the innovation underway to meet bandwidth demand from consumers and businesses – and the accompanying explosive connectivity growth in data centers – we are working on low-latency innovation to speed up the processing time between GPUs. For example, hollow core technologies can enable data to travel in a straight path through waveguides within optical fibers (as compared to the reflecting, or bounce-like, path through solid cores within traditional optical fibers).
In high-precision experimental environments, hollow core technologies have shown they can reduce latency by 34 percent. Sumitomo Electric Lightwave is working with our ecosystem partners to realize this potential and overcome some of the technology’s inherent challenges for operation environments, such as air contamination within hollow cores; interoperability with the installed fiber base, WDM components, and amplifiers; and chromatic dispersion tuning. Our PhDs and engineers are making progress with the goal of transferring the technology beyond our partners, moving hollow core solutions from our labs and factories to industry-wide production and, ultimately, field deployment.
The Human Component
I cannot stress enough how vital collaboration is when it comes to transforming networks during this transformative time. In the company’s long history, our most effective solutions have come from a close understanding of our customers’ specific challenges, priorities, and vision.
Some of the discussions underway today will culminate in the end-to-end ecosystem that will build tomorrow’s data centers. Questions about standardization are on the table: How many cores will be in multicore fibers? How far can we take it? Which AI-ready connector form factors will prevail? At the same time, we are working collaboratively to improve the efficiency of onboard optics, continuing to evolve and adapt to new challenges associated with co-packed optics. If you are interested in working together, contact us anytime. To learn more about the topics and technologies highlighted in this blog, check out my recent ISE Magazine webinar by the same name: “Advances in Fiber Technology.”
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About the author: Usman Nasir, director of business strategy, is an integral part of the company’s global technical strategy for emerging technologies. With nearly 20 years of experience in a diverse array of technologies, he is committed to enabling a transformative impact for a sustainable future. |
Usman’s webinar was sponsored by Sumitomo Electric Lightwave, moderated by Hayden Beeson, Associate Editor ISE Magazine, offered live on August 26, 2025, and is available on demand at https://www.isemag.com/webinars/webinar/55302239/advances-in-fiber-technology.