Vodafone New Zealand on Monday announced the expansion of its partnership with FiberSense to Wellington to utilise existing underground fibre cables to proactively monitor for natural disasters or civil works - and be able to provide advance warning on unexpected third-party issues, for example water or gas pipe leaks.
With seismic activity an ongoing concern in New Zealand, and accidental damage to utilities posing potential for major disruptions, the deployment involves a FiberSense unit providing 24/7 monitoring on more than 100kms of fibre cables within Vodafone’s optical network in central Wellington.
Super-precise vibration sensors the equivalent of a virtual sensor every 3-5m. This will improve network resilience for Vodafone services and are now available to third parties, to result in better reliability for customers.
This follows a successful pilot in Auckland and makes Vodafone New Zealand the first telco in Australasia to be able to deliver FiberSense’s monitoring technology to customers. This means Vodafone can provide utilities such as water and gas companies with data about underground issues while capturing vital data on seismic activity, plus enable other smart city applications such as traffic monitoring.
Applying fibre sensors to utilities is growing internationally to reduce costs and customer disruptions. For example, University of Birmingham research estimates the true economic cost of repairing an underground utility to be 29 times the direct (time and materials costs), so being quickly alerted to an accurate location of a fault should be a huge benefit.
The FiberSense DigitalAsset service provides detection, prevention, and mitigation features to protect the Vodafone network and other underground critical utility assets by giving clients.
Tony Baird, Chief Technology Officer at Vodafone New Zealand
Security and reliability are fundamental to operating a world-class network and the FiberSense service strengthens that capability. We are excited about the opportunity to utilise our network in new and innovative ways and working with FiberSense to turn our optical network into a massive sensing array is an exciting opportunity to expand our product offerings and provide new value-added services to our customers.
Dr Mark Englund, Founder and CEO of FiberSense
We are excited by the rapid growth of our New Zealand sensing capability underpinned by our relationship with Vodafone and its first-class network. This agreement with Vodafone New Zealand also represents a new model for fibre owners to extract revenue opportunities from their existing assets.
