This would be a game changer. I live in a connectivity desert (Bay Area, California). Outside of downtown SF there are virtually no residential options for Fiber. My house is 100 yards from a fiber pump - the quote to run the line was $50,000 (the ISP would waive the first $30,000). When I complained to the tech, he said they only have 7 residential fiber customers in the bay area. If Facebook really can bring high speed Internet to California they could bring it anywhere!
Hmm, there isn't much info on the tech and how the cable is physically laid.<p>Here is a forum topic (in French) detailing how it was attempted in France [0] ca. 20013 to bring the network up to speed. A technician explains[1] that this method is no longer used on new deployments, because of an unexpected issue: hunter's stray bullets often severed the cables. An interesting video [2] is linked in the top post.<p>Maybe the real innovation is that there is no need for a technician to supervise the thing. But I doubt it: it could be cheaper to pay someone to watch it than to deal with the consequences of a failure. Though I am not sure the one I linked could cross pylons, and as such could be only for HV, not MV lines.<p>As usual for a press release, a lot of marketing speech, light on technical details, and the infographics is bullshit, comparing top-end, almost-future fiber optics with previous gen technologies (100Mbps twisted pair vs 25Tbps fiber)<p>[0] <a href="https://lafibre.info/techniques-deploiement/fibre-sur-les-pylones-de-rte/" rel="nofollow">https://lafibre.info/techniques-deploiement/fibre-sur-les-py...</a><p>[1] <a href="https://lafibre.info/techniques-deploiement/fibre-sur-les-pylones-de-rte/msg152201/#msg152201" rel="nofollow">https://lafibre.info/techniques-deploiement/fibre-sur-les-py...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://invidio.us/watch?v=ZZ8aioekrhc&t=42" rel="nofollow">https://invidio.us/watch?v=ZZ8aioekrhc&t=42</a>
A big issue with aerial fiber is that the fiber experiences fairly large changes based on the environment. In areas where there is a lot of lightning, lightning strikes will cause outages. These outages are not caused by physical damage to the cable plant but rather due to very fast changes in the polarization of signals on the fiber (the huge electric field of lightning temporarily causes refractive index changes in the fiber). These index changes manifest as fast polarization rotations >1Mrad/s. This rate of change is often fast enough to make it difficult for current DSP to track. While it can be possible to track the rate of polarization change, it often comes with a trade off in nominal performance.<p>See:
<a href="https://pegconference.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Polarization_Activity_Monitoring_Danny_Peterson.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://pegconference.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Polariz...</a>
In this thread, lots of people who've never heard of OPGW fiber...<p><a href="https://www.aflglobal.com/Products/Fiber-Optic-Cable/Aerial/OPGW.aspx" rel="nofollow">https://www.aflglobal.com/Products/Fiber-Optic-Cable/Aerial/...</a><p>One of the problems with this new thing is that in the event of a fiber cut, restoration times will be VERY long.<p>For everybody who's saying "This will be great for fiber to the home!". Sorry, no. From an ISP perspective this is possibly useful for intercity fiber and medium to long haul DWDM applications. You're not going to be breaking in/out of it to add or drop circuits. It'll go point to point from electrical substation to electrical substation, at each end there will be something like a 10' cube shaped telecom equipment shelter with the optical line terminal equipment in it.
This is a cool project! What happens when that power line needs maintenance or replacement? Are you just severing the cable? Wrapping a backup line? Just doing a splice with new line and moving on?<p>Seems like this also produces a lot of waste over time if you wrap a power line, then have to re-do the work 30 years later (or sooner).
This is a really innovative technology from Facebook that has a lot of potential. Props and hat tip to everyone involved in making it work.<p>Using existing powerlines is a double-edged sword. That infrastructure really does exist everywhere in the world. At the same time, if a powerline is cut or severed, requiring special machinery (or robotics?) to replace the fiber line is going to be a real challenge and can keep people offline for a very long time. Hopefully they're thinking of that scenario.
Very impressive. The problem seems much more daunting than what is typically tackled with robotics. Kudos to the team. Does this mean that the electric utilities will be joining the cable tv and telephone utilities in offering internet services or do the economics only work in locales with electric transmission right-of-ways alone?
Deforming the coil of fiber into a U-shape is exactly what happens inside a standard box of cat-5, if you've ever opened one up. It's basically a figure-8 coil, folded into a U-shape and stuffed into the box. It pays out from the middle, just like any other figure-8 wrap.
If you want to compare with the manual process for crossing obstacles, here’s a little buggy with a gasoline motor, with the lineman hoisting it past an insulator with the help of a pulley, starting around 6:20:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtbtlgAGRaA" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtbtlgAGRaA</a><p>Also related, videos of people walking on the cables after being dropped off by a helicopter onto the live lines:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tzga6qAaBA" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tzga6qAaBA</a><p>A youtube search for 'helicopter lineman' turns up a lot of other material in this vein.
I'm not clear that I'm reading this correctly, but it seems like the basic setup here was that Facebook had an idea for an innovative hardware solution, and made it happen by collaborating closely with a few experts in different related industries. This is notably different than how Google X does things, or how Facebook has previously worked with Aquila and such, and I wonder whether it'll catch on as a model.
Doesn't aerial deployment of fiber have the exact same benefits and drawbacks as aerial deployment of electricity, or anything else? In my neck of the woods (northern Europe) aerial deployment of electricity has been frowned upon for a long time: while cheaper, it is much more likely to cause outages due to environmental factors (or sabotage), so while digging down cables is more expensive, it's a lot more cost efficient in the long run because you don't have to send out technicians multiple times a year to climb poles, fell trees, patch lines etc. -- so pretty much all new deployments are dug down, and the most affected lines are converted to ground lines.<p>I would be interested to hear about these considerations from someone knowledgeable in electric and fiber nets, maybe fiber is somehow different?
<a href="https://www.cnet.com/videos/facebook-built-a-fiber-optic-spewing-power-line-crawling-robot/" rel="nofollow">https://www.cnet.com/videos/facebook-built-a-fiber-optic-spe...</a><p>has a video that shows this robot in action
While you are here and looking at fiber! you can run some software I've started working on.<p>Still very early so thought I'd add it here to see if people are interested?<p>The idea is to get a quick map of where the installations would be and give you a distance cost which can be adjusted based on other factors (aerial v underground, existing assets etc).<p><a href="https://github.com/fhk/tabby_cat/" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/fhk/tabby_cat/</a><p><a href="http://broadband.cat/westdesmoines.html" rel="nofollow">http://broadband.cat/westdesmoines.html</a>
The robot is cool. The economics feel a bit off kilter for me though. With tongue in cheek, I raise the following points:<p>-/ Heaven forfend transferring wealth to the local laborers, to pay them to install this infrastructure. Why waste all that money by converting it into Ugandan wages when it can be spent on robots instead?<p>-/ Hopefully the fibre and connectivity is only leased to the Ugandans, for a more efficient return on the capital investment.<p><i>Hmmm.</i>
If it runs every 1 km wouldn't that require the fiber to be fused every 1 km?<p>Don't know who is going to go up to middle voltage lines to do a fiber cable splice.
Does anyone have context as to why FB finances a project like this? Is there an economic argument (ie expanding FB’s TAM by bringing more people online)? Or is there something more nuanced about better connectivity means higher quality and better converting ads? Or is this just a charitable effort?
Here's what this look like without a robot: <a href="https://www.teralink.ru/index.php/ru/navivka-vols-vl/navivka-na-lep" rel="nofollow">https://www.teralink.ru/index.php/ru/navivka-vols-vl/navivka...</a>
While they have this robot and spool up there, they should look at deploying double wires for redundancy... That way you can survive multiple breaks on the line as long as each break is on a different segment.
Anyone more experienced with fiber deployments--what happens when one of these km-long fibers gets damaged in a storm? Can fiber be easily spliced in the field, or does it have to be substantially replaced?
The machine looks awesome, but it's so complex. It looks like it wouldn't survive two seconds in the Ugandan wilderness. Why not just zip tie the optical cable to the conductor? I bet it could move a lot faster too if it was just tacking the cable instead of this big helical movement.