Our 21st century society depends on cable connectivity. From power to telecoms and fibre optics, the risk of cable damage, failure or faults results in frustrated customers and millions lost in remedial costs.
Fotech LiveDETECT® is solving the issue for customers across the globe. They choose us for the outstanding accuracy of our cable fault detection and the business benefits of our real-time monitoring and enhanced intelligence using AI and Machine Learning.
Our unique distributed acoustic sensing technology helps companies to protect their most business-critical cabling assets all day, every day, with a proven and superior level of accuracy.
onshore cable monitoring brochure
Fotech’s modular fibre optic sensing technology monitors the health of cables automatically, giving you an enhanced understanding of activities as they happen, and gathering intelligence on events that may adversely affect your cables.
In live customer field tests, LiveDETECT II® has been proven to detect cable faults to within just metres, optimising the repair team response and reducing the need for flashover tests that risk secondary harm to an already vulnerable cable. The system is also proven to filter out irrelevant signatures, only alerting on genuine threats and delivering instant alerts to not just cable integrity issues, but the exact nature of the threat. This means that you can protect your cable infrastructure network with enhanced speed and accuracy, all day – every day.
Events that may affect cables, such as third-party interference, accidental damage, or mechanical failure at a substation, all generate vibrations with distinct acoustic characteristics. Fotech’s DAS technology monitors these vibrations, applying cutting-edge photonics to provide continuous and accurate real-time information along your cables. Combined with the Panoptes alarm server, the solution analyses and alerts on the exact nature of the disturbance and the severity of the threat. The EDAM processor can be added to record activity along sections of your cable network. You can then store and replay data for an ongoing understanding of events and an informed strategy for cable monitoring and protection.
LiveDETECT® Cable Network Applications
Onshore cable operators depend on Fotech LiveDETECT II® to monitor and protect:
Cable Integrity Monitoring:
Substation Monitoring:
Onshore cable outages can have severe financial consequences, and cause service disruption for customers. But monitoring thousands of kilometres of cable simultaneously can be a costly and resource-heavy challenge.
The modular nature of Fotech’s DAS cable monitoring solution allows you to confidently monitor your entire cable network in real time, detecting risks to within just metres. Our powerful software and advanced AI programming filter out irrelevant background noise, ensuring that you are only alerted to the events along the cable that matter. LiveDETECT II®’s speed and accuracy have been field-tested and proven in our onshore cable monitoring case study.
It's a solution that equips you to prevent costly downtime by rapidly identifying, pinpointing, and preventing or repairing damage to your cables - before that damage becomes a business threat.
Onshore Cable Monitoring Case Study: $300 Million For 3 Milliseconds
In a 2014, Spread Networks spent $300 million drilling new tunnels to provide more direct route for fibre optic cable from Chicago to New York City, saving 3 milliseconds on communication speed between the two cities. At $100 million per millisecond this represented a major infrastructure investment. But the result is worth millions of dollars to high frequency traders who will have an advantage over competitors with slower communications.
For such a high value cabling asset, it is vital that the network is monitored continuously, and any threats to reliability are swiftly identified and pro-actively addressed. A DAS monitoring solution on such a route would guarantee reliability by identifying potential risks to the cable and facilitating the coordination of security teams.
In other examples, in 2015, Fotech’s Helios DAS monitoring platform was used to investigate a fault in a 150kV cable in an underground conduit between two electrical power substations. The resulting intelligence equipped repair teams to identify the exact location of suspected cable damage with only a single flashover test. The result was a fast, effective repair with minimal risk and cost.
