What have they thought of next in the Facebook hardware division?
New Atlas has the story: Facebook robot crawls along power lines to deliver fiber optic cable. According to the report, Facebook has put the finishing touches on its development of a robot that can autonomously wrap a continuous length fiber-optic cabling around existing medium-voltage power lines.
Named after the Latin word for "silkworm," the Bombyx robot's main body charts level to the ground as its internal mechanism winds a spool of fiber-optic cable around a power line. The robot utilizes machine vision sensors to navigate obstacles. The cable features a special heat-resistant outer jacket that protects it from being melted or stretched by the high temperatures often reached by power lines.
But there are issues. As noted by New Atlas reporter Ben Coxsworth:
Unfortunately, a 1-km reel of regular aerial fiber optic cable is too heavy to be hanging in one place (within the robot) on a typical power line. For that reason, Bombyx uses a special type of cable that incorporates a lighter-weight braided Kevlar cladding, and that drops the optical fiber count from the traditional 96 down to 24. According to Facebook, this should still be sufficient to serve all of the homes and businesses through which each power line passes.
Well, if you say so. On second thought -- some people at the Broadband Technology Report might like a word.
Fiber barn door left wide open in Indiana
Don't ask about the fiber-optic broadband internet and phone systems services in Martinsville, IN -- due to a fiber cut, they just suffered a "total system failure" that lasted over 26 hours.
As reported by Martinsville Bulletin's Bill Wyatt:
At 8:59 a.m. Sunday [Oct. 10], residential and business clients of MiNet, including all city-related internet, VOIP phone services and email, went offline. Even the MiNet support line was rendered inoperable, because it was tied to the same service, leaving customers with no way to report the problem or learn of the cause and estimated time it would take to restore services.
Through the entire outage, the MiNet website maintained that all services were “fully operational.”
Ed. Note -- The whole story is just like this.
Lab: Hollow core more secure
ZDNet's Daphne Leprince-Ringuet recently checked in with a story about how promising hollow core fiber technology's applications for security could be.
The piece notes how researchers say the air-filled fiber-optic cable can transport un-hackable keys for purposes of quantum cryptography. The story observes that hollow core fiber can "be particularly effective for carrying out quantum key distribution (QKD), a security protocol that is in principle un-hackable and could play a key role in protecting sensitive data against ever-more sophisticated cyberattacks."
For the research, BT recently conducted a trial of QKD protocols over a 6 km span of Lumenisity's hollowcore NANF fiber.
Still pretty new
Imagine, if you will, a fiber-optic cable that can sense when it's about to be dug up -- and send a warning. And by the way: Forget about wiring cities with IoT devices – this technology could be how wide-scale sensing gets done going forward:
As explained to The Register [UK] by Mark Englund, CEO of FiberSense, the company uses techniques derived from sonar to sense vibrations in fiber cables. FiberSense shoots lasers down the cables and observes the backscatter as the long strands of glass react to their environment.
"Vibration and sound all modulate strain in fiber," Englund explained, adding that even deeply buried fibers react to vibrations and sound. FiberSense has figured out how to measure changes in a fiber and deduce what made them.
Backhoes, jackhammers and earthquakes are reportedly far from the least of what the technology -- which it must be said is not exactly brand new -- can measure. FiberSense says its system can minutely profile passing traffic, leaky pipes, and even the geotechnical profile of spoil beneath fibers.
Groundhog story? Facebook contracts NEC for undersea fiber
Thus, our fiber diary ends how it began -- with Facebook.
As recorded at GCR - Global Construction Report, citing a rate of data transmission across the Atlantic Ocean that is expected to expand twenty-fold between now and 2035, Japanese IT and electronics giant NEC Corporation has been contracted by Facebook to build an ultra-high performance fiber-optic cable under the Atlantic connecting the US and Europe.
According to GCR, NEC said it would use its new 24-fiber-pair cable and repeaters in the project, which can deliver a maximum transmission capacity of half a Petabit per second, the highest to date for a long-distance repeatered optical subsea cables. Until now, subsea cable has been composed of 16 fiber pairs at most, the company claims.
GCN observes that NEC subsidiary company OCC Corporation "manufactures subsea cables capable of withstanding water pressures at depths beyond 8,000 m."
