EXFO says it will participate in a pilot project with the UK’s National Grid that will focus on fiber monitoring. The project will see the National Grid use EXFO technology to assess the operational condition of its fiber network, predict the network’s remaining lifespan, and identify potential weakness and failure points.
The effort calls for National Grid to also leverage Torrance, CA based Intellisense Systems’ micro weather station (MWS) Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Deployed along the network, the devices are designed to measure the environmental effects of wind, humidity, and meteorological events on network health.
The pilot project will take place across an 80-km span of National Grid’s overhead fiber-optic operational telecommunications network over 12 months. The deployment of EXFO’s optical time domain reflectometer (OTDR) fiber monitoring units and Intellisense Systems devices began last October.
Data from the OTDRs and weather monitoring devices will feed into EXFO’s Nova SensAI platform, which the company says classifies, correlates, and groups abnormal events affecting network performance. If the pilot is successful, National Grid believes that widespread deployment of the technology could save as much as £2.9 million ($3.5 million) from failure avoidance and network lifespan extension.
“Operational telecommunications networks are an important part of our critical national infrastructure and play a key role in enabling our transition to a net zero economy by 2050,” said Tom Charton, senior innovation engineer at the National Grid. “Large parts of our fiber network are reaching an age where failures may become more frequent and more difficult to address. We are therefore exploring new ways to monitor and model fiber health and its evolution over time to enable optimized planning of refurbishment and replacement interventions.”
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