Mark Englund at the forefront of revolutionary fibre tech
A former Northern Territory University engineering graduate is the face behind what has been hailed as the most exciting technology to ever come out of Australia
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A FORMER Northern Territory University engineering graduate, who found himself specialising in the nerdy world of optical fibre sensing, is the face behind what has been hailed as the most exciting technology to ever come out of Australia.
Mark Englund is a born and bred Darwinite and sonar specialist who says his career has been a non-stop adventure — including five mind-boggling years working in Washington DC with the US Navy Research Laboratories (NRL).
“I end up on the front edge of a big shift in the way optical fibre was going to be used in cities and around the rise of the super techs of Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon,” he said.
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Mr Englund is the founder of the Sydney-based international company FiberSense, which has pioneered using land-based telecom fibre assets to sense objects and events in real time.
“FiberSense has the ability to convert Telstra’s fibre infrastructure across Australia to make it a source of high value data for a city,” Mr Englund said.
“We have a pretty clear strategy. It starts with critical asset protection, then we move into municipalities like councils, state and federal governments, and that really is underpinning the deployment of the FiberSense capability. If you think of a very small early version of the mobile phone network environment where Telstra came out and said ‘right we’re deploying this mobile phone network and here’s a coverage map’.
“That’s what FiberSense is. It’s deploying this sensing of the service capability across cities like Telstra did with the mobile phone network.
“We’re not selling sensing hardware to anybody. What we are selling is cover over cities and real-time protection of events and objects.”
Mr Englund said FiberSense is not a sensor business.
“It is more like sensing as a service business … it’s real- time protection of events and objects as a service,” he explained. “Vibration readings are analysed and categorised on FiberSense’s digital platform SuperSoniQ.
“What we are doing is basically bringing the sensing capability that we call VIDAR (vibration and detection and ranging) which captures and analyses vibrations of nearby objects – such as cars, excavators or people across grids like a city CBD using fibre-optic cables.
“The vibration readings are analysed and categorised on our digital platform SuperSoniQ.
“We connect it to fibres that are running out across the streets and roads for example in the CBD and every metre of that cable under the ground is basically a sensing element.
“So if you look at 40,000 to 50,000 sensors deployed across the Darwin CBD we can turn it on over the existing cables that are in the ground without touching anything. You just insert something into a data centre and connect to a piece of fibre and up it comes.
“The first application is actually pretty straight forward. It’s detecting live in real time things like excavation. Excavators cause a fair amount of damage in cities, telecom cables get cut, water pipes are damaged, high voltage underground power is damaged.
“We can see individual road vehicles moving down the corridor of the road in real time from a third party perspective without any equipment needed on the vehicle that we are sensing.
“If you can do it that way then you can switch on all the vehicles in the Darwin CBD for example and we can see them from a centralised view. Think of it like a map with all those vehicles moving around the CBD and there are a range of things we can do with that.
“Things like moving the traffic through the grid a lot more efficiently than you can today by using things like conductive loops at traffic lights.”
Mr Englund said there is an important role in safety.
“If there is an incident on the road we can detect that in real time,” he said. It could even deliver information to autonomous vehicles.
“You can label vehicles, add speed profiles and behaviour, predictors and risk assessments on each vehicle, because we can see them in third party everywhere,” he said.
“So that’s the vehicle piece and then anything that moves down to a pedestrian moving along the footpath.”
Mr Englund acknowledges that this is when the “Big Brother thing rears its head”.
“There is nothing to fear because this system is based on vibration propagating through the ground into the cable … we can’t hear voices, we can’t see faces, and we can’t see number plates, so the anonymity of the things that we are sensing is hard wired into the system from day one,” Mr Englund said.
“This is a new way of looking at moving across a city grid for everybody, not just for the people that own the fibre and the people that own the assets, but it’s the emergency services, it’s the people driving the cars, the consumers. It is basically every stakeholder in the street or road will have a feed in these systems as we go. That’s the vision.”
Mr Englund said asset protection even extends to critical infrastructure such as submarine cables.
“The technology will transform the way critical infrastructure assets are managed,” he said.
“Submarine cables are becoming increasingly important and points of vulnerability for countries.
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“So in the US for example one of the biggest threats today is no longer a plane flying into a building it is actually people taking out submarine cables and infrastructure.
“We have the ability to show total cover of those assets. Anything coming near a cable we can see it before they have even touched the cable.
“You have submarine cables coming into the Territory and they are going to be very important in the whole Indo Pacific theatre.
“We expect at a minimum to be protecting those assets.”
To the end FiberSense’s focus on asset protection across the Asia-Pacific region, includes submarine cable operators Southern Cross Cable Networks.
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