By Gluing Fiber to the Ground, Startup Thinks It Can Slash Broadband Installation Costs for Local Government

Whenever a city wants to install high-speed Internet — be it for economic development, cost-savings for emergency responders or local schools — it must first answer a question: low or high? If a city puts its fiber cables underground, it has to close down traffic, pay the cost of digging equipment and endure the risk of unexpected obstacles like a hidden sheet of rock. If it decides to string up the fiber along utility poles, it has a lot of legal maneuvering, negotiations and paperwork ahead of it to secure permission — before it signs on to pay a leasing fee that never goes away.

In Stillwater (OK) and Fauquier County (VA), people are trying a third option. They are, for lack of a better term, gluing it to the ground. “When you think of broadband, the fiber-optic cables are usually up in the air or they’re buried underground,” said Meagan Kascsak, communications coordinator for the city of Stillwater. “This is kind of in between, it’s on a hard surface like a street or a parking lot in this case.”  The city’s pilot project, which began in May 2017, is one of the first for a startup based in the greater Washington (DC) area called Traxyl (stylized as TRAXyL). The company has patented methods to adhere fiber cables to hard surfaces using substances that should protect them from basically anything, from weather to 50-ton excavators.