Within project INCIPICT (Innovating City Planning through Information & Communications Technologies), funded by the Italian Government after 2009 earthquake, the University of L’Aquila signed an agreement with Sumitomo to deployprototype fibers of which Sumitomo is one of the very few producers world-wide. Thesefibers, referred to as “multi-core” fibers, overperform by far commercial fibers in terms of transmission capacity, when used in conjunction with Space-Division Multiplexing (SDM), a transmission approach that over the past decade has been in the spotlight of all major international conferences on optical communications. The result of this initiative will be the first deployment of SDM fibers in the world, which will offerthe national and international scientific communities a unique laboratory, which willenable implementing and testing new transmission technologies on deployed fibers,rather than in the controlled environment of a traditional research lab.