Fiber Makes It Smart

From this page you should learn:
How fiber optics is used to make applications “smart”
How cities, utilities and others use fiber
Why fiber optics is considered future proof


The term “smart” is getting worn out from overuse. Smart cities, smart cars, smart grids, smart buildings, and many more similar terms have probably been overused, confusing and diminished the meaning of smart. In most cases, what it really means is bringing whatever it modifies up to modern standards of technology.

The terms smart city, smart grid, smart buildings, etc. all refer to the  use of communications. For example, a smart city has communications between its offices, public services, utilities, schools, libraries and any/all other city organizations. It has citywide WiFi, usually several systems for general city use, public safety and open access for its citizens. It has an intelligent traffic system with traffic lights connected to a central computer controller, video at intersections and important street locations, In the future it may have wireless networks for vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communications for not only traffic control but also to accommodate autonomous vehicles.

All these systems require communications, and all those communications depend on optical fiber, even wireless. Besides what the city owns, fiber in the city must provide an infrastructure for telecommunications and broadband for its citizens, perhaps including fiber to the home. Internet service providers may be telcos, CATV companies, utilities, private ISPs (Internet service providers) or the city itself. In addition, fiber is needed to connect private companies, smart buildings, utility grid control systems include microgrids, and anything else that needs communications. Fiber is needed to connect cell sites, especially with the bandwidth needs of 5G.

In this chapter, we’ll look at metropolitan networks and some of the applications that depend on the fiber optic infrastructure a city must have to keep up with today’s technology needs.


Metropolitan Fiber And Smart Cities
Fiber is essential to supporting the development of "Smart Cities." Defining a Smart City is not easy as it is broad in scope and requires forecasting the development of new technologies. Also few of those involved in the various aspects of what makes up a Smart City have the same view of what it means as they see it from only their point of view.

A "Smart City" is one that uses information and communications technology to manage the entirety of the city with the goal of making it more efficient, responsive, and environmentally sensitive, etc. for the benefit of the people, the economy and the city itself.

Let's list some of the services involved in a Smart City like Santa Monica, CA where the Fiber Optic Association has its headquarters.

Santa Monica, CA CityNet fiber optic backbone

Communications - Communications is the central focus of smart cities - communications among city departments and organizations, within the city for residents and visitors and links to the outside world via data (Internet), voice (landline and cellular) and video entertainment (CATV and video streaming).

A proper communications infrastructure will require a city-wide high speed fiber backbone with sufficiently fast connections to the worldwide Internet backbone that neither capacity nor speed is an issue. The fiber backbone provides the connectivity for all the options listed below as well as fiber for citywide ISP connections to the businesses and residents.

Santa Monica has two separate WiFi systems, one for the public and one private for public safety services
 
The fiber backbone provides connections for multiple wireless service providers, both cellular and WiFi, to ensure a competitive marketplace. With the advent of small cells, any utility pole, street light or traffic light can provide quality wireless services without the unsightly cell towers or sites that urban dwellers dislike, even as they want state of the art wireless communications.

Enough fiber and backbone capacity is needed to provide DAS (distributed antenna systems) services to large buildings both private and public, college campuses and sports facilities. 


Santa Monica map of proposed small cell locations

That same backbone also allows Internet service and CATV over a hybrid fiber coax (HFC) network, preferably with multiple competitive services. Having high speed Internet to all citizens allows the choice of conventional CATV services or Internet based viewing packages which are gaining in popularity.



The city of Los Angeles is installing these smart street lights - LED lighting with small cell wireless antennas hidden in the wide section of the light pole near the top. Small cells allow cities to have good cellular service without unsightly cell towers.

City Services - Information about the city and city services for the citizens should be online and accessible. All relevant services should be able to be done online rather than in person.

Transportation and Traffic Management - Smart traffic signals, video and radar monitoring of traffic, parking and creating a vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communications environment that will facilitate autonomous traffic in the future. Public transportation is fully managed, online information and booking provided, wireless available to riders.



Smart light traffic controls



Connected bus in Silicon Valley

Autonomous vehicles have had a rocky start; true autonomous operation is proving much more difficult than anticipated. These vehicles have onboard sensors and information processing to drive on the streets with regular cars. Engineers involved in developing cities of the future talk about vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communications will simplify the task of the vehicle itself and make it operation safer.

 

Having cars talk to each other and with numerous city services - smart traffic signals, traffic signs, information from video surveillance as to the location of other vehicles, pedestrians, bicyclists, etc. requires high bandwidth, low latency wireless communications on a fiber network.

Public Safety Communications - Using communications to make the public safety divisions -fire, police, ambulance, etc. - more responsive and more responsible. This includes wireless communications on reserved frequencies and perhaps a dedicated WiFi network throughout the city and, if there are high-rise buildings that limit penetration of wireless, it may require DAS, distributed antenna systems, inside the buildings.

Surveillance And Sensors -Traditionally video surveillance has been the focus of city-wide surveillance. These videos have been instrumental at preventing and solving crimes in many cities by identifying people. New types of sensors are being deployed, including gunshot sensors that can detect gunshots and locate the source using sophisticated audio techniques. Now the usefulness of those cameras can be extended to tracking traffic for smart vehicles and helping control the movement of traffic.

Installing video surveillance cameras on a street light in St. Louis, MO

Education - The pandemic showed the necessity to connect schools, libraries, and the citizens to share information and optimize the educational experience for all. Students also learn to use the Internet in ways that facilitate their work in high-tech companies in the future.

Public Services - Monitoring and control of public utilities - electrical (generation and distribution as well as renewable), water, sewer, gas, etc. - to make them more efficient and economical is becoming a necessity. The electrical "smart grid" is becoming smarter, integrating alternative energy sources with traditional electrical generation and distribution.

With cities that have many business and private solar system for example, integrating those sources and smoothing out the use of electricity is leading many to assume that local storage, batteries usually, can be used to store excess energy during the day for use at night. Managing these kinds of facilities requires sophisticated grid management, often down to the local level - called micro-grids -

Support For Business - The economy of a city depends on a healthy, expanding business base. This goes beyond just providing high speed Internet to businesses, it means offering really high bandwidth services to data-centric businesses and even data centers located in the city. Cities should have plans for tech incubators and services to support and facilitate new businesses locating there.

The Internet Of Things - IoT is an overused and little understood term that seems to imply that all sorts of things communicate over the internet creating a communications environment that facilitates the development of logical connections for improving the quality and economics of services. It implies that Internet connections, wireless and landline, is everywhere and cheap enough to allow connecting all sorts of devices.

Data Centers - We include a data center as a required city service because Smart Cities are built on data. A large city could require a data center approaching the size of the mega-data centers being used by the large Internet companies or cloud service providers. Smaller cities of course can use smaller data centers or cloud service providers. But provision for acquiring, analyzing, utilizing and storing such large amounts of data requires planning for facilities and the personnel to operate them as well as sufficient communications services to handle the massive amounts of data involved. Recent data centers working on AI consume too much power for most cities or suburban areas so they are being built in more remote areas.

Partnerships - Smart cities require cooperation. Some of the services mentioned already exist in many cities but often are owned and operated by different entities. Duplicating resources is costly so sharing of resources, especially backbone fiber, is recommended, with appropriate compensation, whenever possible. For instance, a single street light can provide lighting, video and/or radar for surveillance and traffic management, WiFi for private and public use including vehicle communications, locations for small cell telecommunications, weather and pollution monitoring and other yet unforeseen services.

Slide from a presentation by the city of San Leandro, CA

Why Stop At Gigabits?

Let's Design Fiber Networks For Terabits. When discussing fiber infrastructure for smart cities, we often talk about "Gigabit Cities," which are certainly the state of the art today. GPON or 10GPON are the way to provide gigabit FTTH, and DOCSIS-3 or RFOG can provide similar bandwidth for CATV systems. 5G and WiFi 6 wireless promise almost as much bandwidth,.

But fiber optic networks are good for 20-40 years at least, so what happens as time moves on? Is Gigabit good enough? Based on the history of the communications networks and the Internet, the answer is obvious, of course not. Doesn't it make sense to design fiber optic networks today that will be good in the future - the Terabit future?

Graph of Internet speeds from Netly Fiber.

Another issue that makes sense is "open access." If the owners of the fiber optic cable plant are not service providers, they can provide the connections to the users and allow multiple ISPs, CATV companies, telcos, etc. to co-locate in their head end.

If a customer wants to add or change service providers, only a simple patchcord change is needed. Open access networks are preferable for cities because it can allow more flexibility in offering services to citizens and for the city's own uses.

Can networks like this be built today? That's what a company called Netly Fiber has done in Solana Beach, CA. In June 2022, Netly completed their 2-year project of building a fiber network in Solana Beach that shows that with some forethought, you can build "Terabit" fiber optic networks today that should be good for the lifetime of the fiber.

What exactly is Netly doing that is different? The multi-million dollar project took two years to complete and includes ultra-high speed dark fiber access for every residence, business, traffic light, and institution in the city. To achieve terabit speeds the Netly team took a bold approach and built multiple dedicated strands of fiber to each address located on city streets. Over 30,000 fibers are available for Solana Beach's 6,000 households.

Yes, every user in the city can have dedicated fiber back to Netly's head end. And the fiber network is open access; Netly is not an ISP, telecom or CATV company, they just provide the dark fibers and colocation space for service providers. Service providers locate their equipment at Netly's head end, patch into their customers' fibers and provide their services using whatever protocols they choose.

Service providers' equipment (including splitters for PON networks) are placed in the Netly Edge Fiber Center (headend)

Does a centralized fiber infrastructure make sense? Most networks today are based on PONs, passive optical networks that use splitters to serve multiple users from a single network GPON OLT port over one fiber, with splitters placed along the network route. But will that architecture still work in a decade or two? Possible, as 10G is already here and 100G PONs using coherent transmission in R&D. And, then again, maybe not. In the future we may need direct connection to every user.

The centralized fiber network Netly uses is really insurance for the future. If you are using GPON on Netly's cable plant today, you put your equipment in their head end along with the PON splitters and connect to every user on their dedicated fiber. If the architecture changes to direct connection to the user in the future, a simple change of equipment is all that is needed. Is centralized fiber affordable today? Netly thinks so. But they are utilizing state-of-the-art products and technologies.

The notion of centralized fiber with a connection to every user makes sense today because fiber is inexpensive and this architecture reduces the need for numerous fiber distribution hubs and pedestals for splitters or other equipment scattered around the service areas. And centralized fiber architecture is ready for terabit applications.

Solana Beach is somewhat urban but mostly suburban in geography. Underground installation was required in areas where aerial cables were not permitted, so using microtrenching made sense for the installation method.  Each trench route has a microduct with six ducts. When only one duct was used, 288 fibers in the microcable were available, but each route could be expanded to 6 of the 288 fiber microcables for 1728 fibers total.

Netly microtrenches then installs 6 microducts.

Netly's microtrenching technique deserves a mention also. Where possible, that is there are no conflicts with other buried utilities, they trench at the joint between the road pavement and the curb, minimizing damage to either. Drops are done in small handholes near the curb, leaving an installation that is almost undetectable. And installation is quick, making for minimal disruption in a neighborhood.

That’s how you build a terabit city, a city today built for the future.

Electrical Utilities And Smart Grid

Electrical utilities were among the first industries to adopt fiber optics, closely following the telephone companies who were directly involved in developing the technology. Telcos saw fiber optics as being the most cost-effective means to send information faster over longer distances at a lower cost. Utilities saw that too and knew it could be a solution to their problems of communications and grid management.

For electrical utilities, sending signals over fiber solved another major problem for them, electrical interference by high voltage transmission lines. Electrical voltage creates electromagnetic interference (EMI) that can couple into any conductive cable and interfere with data communications. Optical fiber, however, is made from glass which is therefore immune to EMI. Fiber optic cable can be made totally without conductive contents also which allows installation near power conductors.

Utilities began using fiber optics anywhere communications was needed near power equipment, like substations or control rooms, as part of their grid management system. Fiber was an obvious candidate for use on transmission lines, so it was not long before the invention of optical power ground wire (OPGW.)

OPGW was made like a regular conductive wire used for high voltage transmission, but in the center of the wire was a hollow tube with optical fibers inside. On transmission lines, the ground wire is an unshielded conductor on the top of the tower that is grounded at each tower. It is used as a shield for power conductors below it. So, the ground wire is the wire that gets hit by lightning and safely conducts it to an earth ground.

Yes, even lightning strikes don’t affect the optical fibers inside the OPGW.

OPGW runs on the top of the transmission tower but must be brought down to the ground for splicing and connection to equipment. You can see service loops of OPGW on towers near the ground with regular fiber optic cable spliced to it connecting into the equipment buildings.

OPGW was quickly adopted by utilities for their communications needs and grid management. It’s unlikely that any new transmission lines would be built today without OPGW. Cable manufacturers now also offer power conductors with fibers inside, called OPCC (optical power phase conductors,) so if a tower is getting new power lines, that could also be an option to install more fiber.

Today, many utilities are still using OPGW that is 20 or 30 years old, old enough that they are wondering if it’s time to update or replace it. The question is how. Replacing the ground wire on transmission towers is a difficult task that may require shutting down power, not a practical option.

Other options exist for utilities to update their communications along transmission and distribution lines. Not only is fiber non-conductive, but fiber optic cable is generally non-conductive also. Most aerial fiber optic cables are installed by lashing to a steel messenger wire strung between poles, but there is a category of cables with special high strength jacket designs called all-dielectric self-supporting cables (ADSS).

ADSS cables are designed to withstand very high tension loads, making them capable being installed with long spans between supports, up to 1 kilometer in some cases. They can be installed on transmission towers or utility poles below the power conductors in the telecom space with simple hardware that is easy to install.

ADSS cable has been used in many utility applications on both transmission and distribution systems. Its use is not just limited to electrical utilities, but also can be used in many other aerial installations where it is more convenient and/or cost effective than lashing cables to current cables or installing a new messenger wire.

Another option has been developed for installing fiber on power lines. This technique takes a small, lightweight fiber optic cable and wraps it around or lashes it to the power line. The cable is called OPAC, optical power attached cable, and is lashed to the power cable with a specialized tool that is pulled from the ground.

With the interest in grid management, microgrids, alternative energy and of course all communications, electrical utilities have very high interest in fiber optics.


Alternative Energy
Fiber optics has been used in the generation and transmission of electrical energy since it first became available, first in conventional generation facilities and transmission facilities. With the growth of utility scale wind and solar power generation, fiber optics gained even greater use. What the solar and wind projects have in common is the use of technology to maximize their efficiency.

Wind turbines for power generation are generally located in remote areas. The huge turbines used today require monitoring and control to optimize the power they generate and synchronize it to the power grid.  Every turbine needs monitoring and control of the blades and alignment to maximize the power from the wind. The size of the blades and generator create extreme stress on the components, so it is important to monitor the operation of the equipment, including monitoring vibration that can indicate problems.

Each turbine must be connected to a central monitoring facility, often a long distance from many turbines. These wind turbine are connected with electrical power cables that connect them to the grid and fiber optic cables used for communications and control. Cables that are power cables with fiber optics in the center, similar to the optical power ground wire used in transmission lines, are sometimes used.

Utility scale solar systems produce many megawatts of power output and cover not just acres but square miles of land. These solar generating facilities require continuous monitoring and control. Solar panels (or mirrors in some facilities) are constantly moving to follow the sun for increased efficiency, often requiring thousands of fiber optic cables in a large facility. Connecting them to the grid and integrating their power requires controls provided over fiber optics.

Utility scale solar facilities cover thousands of acres of land. That means that the fiber optic network connecting all this monitoring and control hardware is immense. The Ivanpah thermal solar plant in the California desert has over 13,000 individual cables and 200 miles of fiber optic cable in their network.

Electrical Utilities Role In Delivering Broadband

Electrical utilities and rural electrical co-ops are especially well suited to provide broadband as they upgrade their communications networks for grid management. The networks they are building can often be easily expanded to include fiber optic broadband to every customer.

The Electrical Power Board (EPB) in Chattanooga, Tennessee is often cited as an example of how electrical utilities can provide broadband to cities. The Connect Anza project mentioned in the FTTH chapter is an example of how a rural coop can build a broadband network for its customers.

The problem with broadband reaching rural areas is similar to the problems getting electrical service to those areas a century ago. There was an article called Rural Electrification in the 1940 Yearbook of Agriculture written by Robert T. Beall, an economist at the Rural Electrification Administration, about the history of rural electrification in the US.

According to Beall, in 1925 only 3.2% of America’s 6.3 million farms had electricity. By 1935, it had only grown to 10.9%, in part due to the depression but also due to the inherent problem with rural areas, economics. Beall’s article quotes a report on the problem.

By 1940, 25% of rural farms had electricity. What happened in the short span of 5 years? During the Depression, rural electrification was specifically included in the emergency Relief Appropriation act of 1935 and President Roosevelt created the Rural Electrification Administration by Executive Order No. 7037 on May 11, 1935.

The effect of government incentives was felt rapidly. By 1940 about 25% of rural America had electrical service. Much of the expansion was done by a new type of utility, nonprofit cooperatives, created by farmers who discovered that they could organize and get assistance in building their own electrical companies.

Coops also learned how to lower costs for building networks by simplifying aerial cable systems and using long-span construction. Some of their techniques allowed building networks at less than half the cost of traditional urban/suburban networks.

In reading this article, you could replace electrical references with broadband and it would make perfect sense for today. The situation today is quite similar. The US government is appropriating money directed to broadband as part of an infrastructure package. Rural electrical systems and coops are well positioned to build these networks. They already have the rights of way and a lot of workers already familiar with fiber optics. And there are fiber optic technologies that can simplify building networks and reduce costs.

Some rural electrical systems already have fiber that can be used for broadband, even fiber to the home, requiring just that the connection to users be completed. Building new or expanding current fiber networks is simplified by the fiber technologies developed for FTTH to simplify connecting users with fiber.

Fiber Optics Makes Smart Buildings

Smart buildings are modern buildings that utilize technology to make them more secure (video surveillance, security systems, etc.), efficient (HVAC, electrical, lighting, environmental controls, etc.) and offer modern communications services (Internet, wireless, etc.).

The confusing aspect of creating a smart building is what is the responsibility of the building owner or manager and what is the responsibility of the tenants. One would assume that the building architects and engineers would plan for the building’s electrical, lighting, security and environmental control systems including fire alarms. The tenants are expected to install their own private security systems, IT (information technology) systems, including LANs and WiFi.

But what about other essential services like mobile/cellular service? Most large buildings, especially those with heat-reflective glass, have problems with cellular coverage indoors where about 80% of all cell calls originate – not outdoors. Systems that provide cell coverage indoors, called DAS for distributed antenna systems,  are widely used in large public spaces like sports facilities or convention centers.

Is it the responsibility of the building owner or the tenant to provide these services? Tenants can provide it in their spaces if cellular over WiFi is inadequate, but what about public spaces in the building? Can emergency responders be certain they will have coverage in all those areas? That may be required under local building codes. It should probably be considered another essential service at the building level.

Most companies depend on reliable high-speed Internet services for their business. Most want more than one Internet service provider (ISP) for backup and additional capacity during high usage times. Every tenant needs a secure room for their communications connections and hardware.

It’s the hardware that can vary a lot. Some companies today have large data needs but rely on cloud computing services, so they need less hardware but more bandwidth. Some companies have small “data centers,” the term that now has replaced the computer equipment room, even if their data and computing needs are small.

Then you have power users. Co-location companies that host Internet servers for multiple clients are probably the biggest of the power users.  Companies doing computer graphics, animation and games are heavy users of computing power and data. A computer-animated movie can use the equivalent of a supercomputer, generate terabytes of data and require Internet connections capable of moving terabytes of data daily. High speed stock traders are another power user and they need connections to private fibers that offer low latency communications to computers at stock exchanges. 

If the building is designed to be “smart,” it needs pathways to provide multiple fiber optic backbones with connections to every tenant. It should have convenient connections at many locations to simplify drops to the tenants and allow frequent moves, adds and changes. A smart building needs redundant services, at least two physically separate backbone pathways to each drop. Redundancy is wasted unless the services are routed far enough apart to ensure one survives when the other is damaged.

The building must also have an entrance facility that can accommodate large numbers of connections to fiber optic cables from service providers and house the equipment they need to locate onsite. That facility must be secure and “hardened” with special attention paid to possible disasters like fire, flood, storms, earthquake or terrorism.

Obviously, every tenant needs electrical power. Some need a lot more than others if they have significant amount of tech hardware. Power needs to be “clean” – data quality – and must have uninterruptible power backup. Backups can include batteries, fuel cells and generators capable for supplying power for significant periods of time. Some tenants may even want their own dedicated backups which would require additions to the physical plant.

Town Square Place in New Jersey is a fully equipped smart building

Buildings planned from the beginning to accommodate smart clients are being built around the world. An excellent example is 11 Town Square Place in Hoboken, NJ, right across the Hudson River from Wall Street. The floors at the top and bottom of the building offer a high standard of tech, but the middle floors were designed as data center floors. All the special building services mentioned here are provided to the “power” tenants.

Not every building needs to offer the option of data center floors, but the services offered to the regular floors in this building are what many clients expect today.

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