NDFF User Day 2026: Research Enabled by the UK Dark Fibre Network

The National Dark Fibre Facility (NDFF) hosted its annual User Day on 4 June 2026 at UCL, bringing together researchers and users of NDFF to showcase recent research and discuss future priorities for the facility.

The event, attended both in person and online, was opened by Professor Alwyn Seeds, NDFF Director, who welcomed participants and introduced the facility.

The User Day featured a diverse range of research enabled by the NDFF, demonstrating the role of the national dark fibre infrastructure in supporting emerging communications, sensing, computing and quantum technologies.

Presentations highlighted the breadth of applications supported by the NDFF, included research on photonics-enabled sub-THz networks for future C-RAN-based 6G infrastructure, distributed acoustic sensing for urban noise analysis, optical fibre transmission beyond the C-band, optical computation-in-communication for low-latency, high-fidelity perception in telesurgery, and digital twin frameworks for entanglement-based quantum networks, and further talk explored the capabilities and future possibilities of hollow-core optical fibre.

The User Day concluded with a discussion on “User Priorities for the National Dark Fibre Network”. The discussion provided an opportunity for NDFF users to share their research needs and priorities and to consider how the facility can continue to support the development of emerging research areas and future communications technologies.

The NDFF User Day demonstrated the wide range of research applications enabled NDFF and provided valuable insight into the future needs of the NDFF user community.