Optical Fiber Connections Through Existing Sewers and Natural Gas Pipes

摘要

Deployment of metro optical fiber networks requires extensive construction, usually involving excavation of city streets. These excavations cause pollution, traffic hold-ups, economic loss, and unsafe conditions to the inhabitants in every city. Even worse, the repair of the streets after excavation rarely left the streets in acceptable condition. These forced mayors to issue moratoriums on new open cut excavations involved in the last mile work. Leasing space inside of existing sewers, water pipes, and natural gas pipes by either private telecos or utility owned telcos has a rather interesting appeal in that owners of existing sewers and gas pipes get to generate a new revenue stream and telecos could install their optical fiber cables at an attractive cost. However, the fiber companies have to recognize that these utilities are the result of substantial public investment running into trillions of dollars combined with over 100 years of engineering advances and the owners of these pipes have to keep proper functioning of these pipes for originally intended functions first at heart at all times. If proper standard of care is not practiced, it is only a matter of time until major problems will manifest and the token pipe lease fee paid by a fiber installer to the owners of these pipes will amount to nothing compared to the cost the public will have to bear to return the sewers back to normal. This paper provides a detailed account of the track record in this field around the world of most deployments to date, and the engineering lessons learned. This paper also presents an account of progress made to date in standardization work for this new industry. This paper provides an overview of various technologies, and makes an open invitation to those qualified engineers and scientists in the global market to submit their valuable input toward preparing engineering guidelines with ASCE sponsorship and consensus standards within ASTM International.