One Passive Fiber, Guarding Hundreds of Kilometres
Fences, patrols and cameras leave blind spots, generate false alarms and cannot scale across long borders, pipelines and rail corridors. Distributed Acoustic Sensing turns a single optical fiber into thousands of virtual microphones — detecting, classifying and pinpointing intrusions in real time, with no powered equipment in the field.
The Problem with Conventional Perimeter Security
Strategic assets — airports, railways, pipelines, transmission corridors, government precincts and long land borders — share one vulnerability: they extend over distances and areas that are impractical to watch continuously with people and cameras alone.
Limited range.
Cameras and physical sensors cover only short stretches, leaving blind spots across remote terrain.
Reactive by nature.
Patrols are labour-intensive, and an intrusion is often discovered only after the fact.
False-alarm fatigue.
Conventional sensors trip on weather and animals, eroding operator trust in every alert.
Exposed field hardware.
Powered equipment is vulnerable to theft, vandalism, lightning and outages — and costly to maintain at scale.
The result is a security posture that is reactive rather than proactive, and that becomes prohibitively expensive as the protected boundary grows.
How Distributed Acoustic Sensing Works
A central interrogator unit sends coherent laser pulses along a standard telecom-grade optical fiber. Tiny natural imperfections in the glass scatter a little light back. Any vibration or sound near the fiber — a footstep, a vehicle, digging, a fence being cut — subtly changes that backscatter, letting the system detect, classify and pinpoint the event along the entire length of the cable.
The fiber itself is completely passive: no power, no electronics and no maintenance in the field. The intelligent interrogator sits safely inside a control room, turning unused or dedicated fibers into a continuous, tamper-aware sensor array spanning tens or hundreds of kilometres.
One fiber, three threat domains
| Domain | What it detects |
|---|---|
| Fence-mounted | Climbing and cutting, cable tampering and sabotage — while rejecting wind, rain and wildlife. |
| In-ground (buried) | Early detection of digging and tunnelling; footstep recognition even in difficult terrain; tamper alerts on the cable itself. |
| Corridor / open terrain | Vehicle movement along or across the line, including off-road; intrusion localised to within metres. |
Every detected event is mapped along the boundary on a command-and-control platform, with colour-coded overlays, operator-defined zones, customisable alarm thresholds and AI classification.
Key Capabilities and What They Mean for You
| Capability | What it delivers |
|---|---|
| 100 km range per unit, two channels | One unit protects an entire airport perimeter many times over, or a long stretch of pipeline, border or rail — minimising the number of sites to build and secure. |
| Fully passive field cable | Nothing to steal, vandalise or power on the line; immune to local outages; minimal maintenance in remote regions. |
| AI / deep-learning classification | Reliably separates real threats from wind, rain and wildlife, keeping false-alarm rates extremely low so operators act on every alert. |
| >75% improved dynamic range | Fifth-generation precision and world-leading measurement range — without signal amplifiers in the field. |
| Built-in cyber-security | State-of-the-art IT security protects the system from unauthorised access — essential for government and defence. |
| Low power, long life | ~30% lower power consumption and more than double the product lifetime, lowering total cost of ownership. |
It integrates with existing security, CCTV (slew-to-cue) and SCADA control-room systems, so it enhances rather than replaces current investments.
One Platform Every National Asset
| Asset | Protection delivered |
|---|---|
| Airports | Perimeter intrusion detection along fences and runways; breaches, climbing and unauthorised airside vehicle movement; ICAO-aligned situational awareness. |
| Government precincts | Discreet, buried and fence-line protection of high-value sites with precise localisation and very low false alarms — no visible field hardware to probe or defeat. |
| Railways | Track-side monitoring for intrusion, sabotage, cable theft and third-party interference — a proven application on national railways. |
| Oil & gas pipelines | Continuous detection of third-party interference, illegal tapping and digging near the right-of-way over hundreds of kilometres from a few control points. |
| Military & defence sites | Tamper-proof, electronics-free perimeter sensing that cannot be located or jammed in the field. |
| Borders | Wide-area detection of footsteps, vehicles and digging across remote frontiers — over 100 km per unit — to counter smuggling and illegal crossings. |
| Power & water utilities | Protection of substations, transmission corridors and water infrastructure against intrusion, theft and sabotage. |
Performance You Can Measure
Value is proven on real infrastructure before any wider roll-out. At a defined airport-perimeter deployment, performance is evaluated against clear, documented targets:
| Metric | Target |
|---|---|
| Intrusion detection rate (climb / cut / breach) | ≥ 99% of staged intrusion tests detected |
| Event localisation accuracy | Within a few metres of true location |
| Nuisance / false alarms | Substantial reduction vs. current system |
| Operator response to alert | Real-time alert with map and camera cue |
| Perimeter per unit | Full airport perimeter, expandable on one interrogator |
Figures are illustrative targets confirmed during an on-site survey, and frame how a deployment is evaluated.
Why it scales where cameras cannot
Because the sensing element is just glass fiber, the cost of protecting an extra kilometre is the cost of a passive cable — not another powered camera, sensor and trench of wiring. A single interrogator in a control room covers up to 100 km, so one platform can grow from a single airport to a national network of railways, pipelines, borders and utilities without changing the technology or retraining operators.