Viavi enhances sensing for fibre-enabled critical infrastructure

With critical infrastructure operators facing challenges in protecting and optimising their assets, while at the same time the costs associated with damage to their vital resources often dwarf initial investment, Viavi Solutions has announced the launch of Nitro Fiber Sensing, an integrated real-time asset monitoring and analytics service for optical fibre infrastructure.

As a result, monitoring and assurance offerings for telecommunications, cloud, enterprises, first responders, military, aerospace and railway, swift detection, localisation and prevention of external threats will help minimise damage and outages, leading to lower total cost of ownership (TCO). In addition, optimising operations helps ensure production targets are met.

Comprising distributed temperature sensing (DTS), simultaneous temperature and strain sensing (DTSS), and distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) technologies, Nitro Fiber Sensing is designed to provide the critical intelligence needed to swiftly identify and pinpoint threats.

Viavi envisages that its new offering will see use in a variety of industries ranging from oil, gas and water pipelines to electrical power transmission, border and perimeter security, and datacentre interconnects.

Nitro Fiber Sensing also uses remote fibre test heads (FTH), commonly known as interrogators, to monitor fibre optic cables or fibre-enabled infrastructure. By performing real-time distributed fibre optic sensing, FTH can measure temperature and strain along a fibre or detect acoustic vibrations close to a fibre.

Deployed at strategic locations, including along power cables and pipelines, FTH can discover valuable infrastructure health data that can be used to drive proactive maintenance and prevent downtime. Alerts notify operators of potential threats from human interference, vehicle movement, digging operations, fishing nets or ship anchors encroaching on valuable assets. These alarms include precise location information to assist maintenance, response or repair teams.

“As a leader in fibre monitoring, Viavi is trusted to monitor millions of miles of fibre with thousands of test heads around the world today,” said Viavi vice-president and general manager of fibre and access solutions, Kevin Oliver. “We take fibre monitoring to the next level with the Nitro Fiber Sensing solution. As the use of fibre optic cables increases across various industries to enable accurate, resilient monitoring while complying with security regulations, our broad portfolio serves each customer’s unique needs.”

Putting the launch into context, a March 2024 study of more than 1,500 telecom and IT engineers, and managers at communications services providers (CSPs) in 17 countries across the globe found new offerings across fibre network infrastructure and operations will be required as artificial intelligence (AI) fundamentally enhances network performance.

The most popular strategies believed to improve performance included upgrading networks with new traffic and network analysis software, selected by 49% of respondents, along with upgrades in switches and routers (43%), and investment in 800G technology (40%), underscoring the multi-faceted approach operators are adopting to bolster network capabilities.

Almost all (99%) respondents who expect a percentage increase in traffic between datacentres and the network edge to be carried, as a result of AI usage, believe they will need to upgrade fibre-optic networks to support more AI traffic.