Interesting quotes from the article:
"There has not been a significant improvement in the minimum attenuation—a measure of the loss of optical power per kilometer traveled—of optical fibers in around 40 years...
"The new design maintains low losses of around 0.2 dB/km over a 66 THz bandwidth and boasts 45% faster transmission speeds...
"The new fiber is a kind of nested antiresonant nodeless hollow core fiber (DNANF) with a core of air surrounded by a meticulously engineered glass microstructure.
"The team believes that further research can reduce losses even more, possibly down to 0.01 dB/km, and also help to tune the fiber for low-loss operation at different wavelengths. Even the losses achieved, however, open up the potential for longer unamplified spans in undersea and terrestrial cables and high-power laser delivery and sensing applications, among others."
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