HomeCloud/NFVMicrosoft acquires UK hollow core fibre specialist Lumenisity

Microsoft acquires UK hollow core fibre specialist Lumenisity

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But the software giant runs into more regulatory hurdles regarding its proposed takeover of Activision Blizzard King

Award-winning Lumenisity is known for its hollow core fibre (HCF) products and has been used in BTโ€™s R&D facility at Adastral Park.

Microsoft says its acquisition of the British specialist firm โ€œwill expand [its] ability toโ€ฆoptimize its global cloud infrastructure and serve Microsoftโ€™s Cloud Platform and Services customers with strict latency and security requirementsโ€.

These customers are in sectors as diverse as healthcare, financial services, manufacturing, retail and government that rely on high bandwidth, secure networks and data centres for high-speed transactions.

Microsoft says that regarding the public sector, HCF could provide better security and intrusion detection for federal and local governments across the globe.

In healthcare HCF can accommodate the size and volume of large data sets to accelerate medical imagesโ€™ retrieval and ingestion, and sharing of medical imaging data in the cloud. 

For international financial institutions it could support fast, secure transactions across a broad geographic region.

Lumenisityโ€™s HCF has a proprietary design whereby light propagates in an air core. The claimed advantages of this over traditional cable with a solid glass core of glass are itโ€™s:

  • faster with lower latency as light travels through HCF 47% faster than standard silica glass;
  • more secure and better able to detect intrusion due its inner structure;
  • cheaper because of its increased bandwidth and better network quality by eliminating fibreโ€™s nonlinearity issues and use of broader spectrum; and
  • potential for ultra-low signal loss, which enables transmissions over longer distances without repeaters.

Call of Duty muted by FTC

Meanwhile, back in the gaming universe, Microsoftโ€™s proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard King for $68.7 billion โ€“ which most notably includes the massively popular game Call of Duty โ€“ has hit another snag.

The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) says it will stop the transaction. Many voices have raised concerns that the proposed transaction will damage competition because, for example, Starfield will be exclusive to Xbox, strengthening Microsoftโ€™s device and subscription businesses.

Microsoftโ€™s Xbox Game Pass is thought to have more than 30 million users, although Xbox has signed deals with rivals Nintendo and Steam to keep Activation Blizzard games open to them.

One of the loudest voices opposing the deal is PlayStationโ€™s Jim Ryan who has even had in-person meetings with European Commission execs. Interestingly, the European Commission has rebutted one of the FTCโ€™s main objections to the Activation Blizzard deal.

Sony, one of the loudest critics of the proposed deal, famously has a number of huge successes that are limited to its own PlayStation platform.