In the 21st Century, we increasingly depend on a connected world. This is especially true for the power and communications cables we now so heavily rely on, which are vulnerable to both accidental and malicious damage, as well as electrical and mechanical failures.
These interruptions leave customers disappointed and are costly to operators.
Using fibre optic cables, Fotech’s Distributed Acoustic Sensor (DAS) technology can monitor the health of cables automatically, giving you an enhanced understanding of activities as they happen, and gathering intelligence on events around or involving your cables.
Distributed Acoustic Sensor (DAS) technology converts an optical fibre into a state-of-the-art sensor that can detect vibrations along the length of a cable. Events, including third party interference – such as digging or lifting an access cover – or mechanical failure at a substation, all generate vibrations with distinct acoustic characteristics. Fotech’s DAS solution monitors these vibrations, which are analysed by cutting-edge software to provide continuous and accurate real-time information along your cables, using advanced artificial intelligence (AI) to alert you to potential risks to your cable or inform maintenance needs.
Cable Integrity:
Substation Monitoring:
Cable downtime is costly but monitoring thousands of kilometres of cable is challenging. DAS allows you to confidently monitor your cables in real time and detect risks to within a few metres. Fotech’s powerful software and advanced AI filter out the background noise and ensure that you are alerted to the events along the cable that matter.
A DAS solution allows you to prevent costly downtime with the ability to prevent or quickly repair damage to your cables.
In a 2014, Spread Networks spent $300 million drilling new tunnels to make a more direct route for fibre optic cable from Chicago to New York City, saving 3 milliseconds on the communication speed between the two cities. At $100 million per millisecond, it sounds expensive, but is worth millions of dollars to high frequency traders who will have an advantage over competitors with slower communications.
Being so valuable to its thousands of clients, the network must be monitored continuously, and all parts of the network are driven daily to guarantee reliability and proactively fix issues. A DAS solution on such a route would guarantee reliability by identifying potential risks to the cable and facilitating the coordination of security teams.
