STAC Report: Latency study of OFS hollow-core fiber

Cabled OFS AccuCore hollow-core fiber was 1.6 ns/m faster than solid-core

2 June 2021

STAC recently tested OFS AccuCore hollow-core fiber (HCF) against solid-core, single-mode fiber. The STAC Report is available here.

Trading-infrastructure engineers strive to remove every nanosecond of latency from the full technology stack used to communicate with markets and make trading decisions, including the network medium. To determine what, if any advantage, the OFS hollow-core fiber can provide, STAC compared the arrival times of packets sent simultaneously over lengths of hollow-core fiber and AllWave FLEX Max Optical Fiber single-mode fiber (SMF).

The primary "stack under test" (SUT) was a single 100m cable containing 2 x HCF + 2 x SMF LCU/LCU, using one HCF fiber and one SMF fiber. STAC also tested secondary SUTs consisting of 10m and 3m cable lengths as a sanity check on manufacturing consistency.

Comparing the arrival times for tens of millions of packets enabled us to factor out instrumentation noise to establish the latency difference between the two kinds of fiber.

The key result was:

• Compared to AllWave FLEX Max Optical Fiber (single-mode fiber), AccuCore HCF Fiber Optic Cable (hollow-core fiber) was 1.6 nanoseconds faster per meter.

For details, please see the report at the link above. Premium subscribers have access to the code used in this project as well as the micro-detailed configuration information for the solution. To learn about subscription options, please contact us or take a minute to learn about subscription options.