Facebook Fiber Robot Would Enable Installation on Electric Infrastructure

Facebook Connectivity, in collaboration with a number of partners, has spent the last few years developing an aerial fiber deployment solution that uses a robot designed to safely deploy a specialized fiber-optic cable on medium-voltage (MV) power lines. This system combines innovations in the fields of robotics and fiber-optic cable design to dramatically lower the cost of deploying fiber by utilizing electrical infrastructure. While there have been tremendous improvements in the strength and size of a fiber strand, as well as the amount of data a strand can carry, there has not yet been a widely applicable solution for reducing the cost of fiber construction. Since the cost of deploying fiber comes almost entirely from construction, this was the area we wanted to address. If successful, we believe this technology will allow fiber to effectively and sustainably be deployed within a few hundred meters of much of the world’s population. We expect to see technology trials of this fiber deployment system in 2019. We aim for this technology to enable equal construction of fiber in rural and lower-income communities as well as affluent ones, with open access to the fiber, fair and equitable pricing, decreasing prices for capacity as traffic grows, and shared benefits of the fiber network with the electric company.