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Hi, welcome to Power of the Network. I'm your host, Tim Locker, Vice President of Broadband here at CBM. Today we're going to take a deeper look at some new emerging technologies with fiber optics. We all understand the benefit of fiber, what it's done for us with broadband and fiber at the home projects, but fiber optics can do so much more. And today we've got Mr. Paul Dickinson. He's the Director of Business Development at Dura-Line.
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Paul has just immersed himself in some of this new emerging technology with fiber and we're gonna get into a discussion with him today. So let's get right into it.
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Paul, thanks for joining us today. I'm glad you made the trip to come in. Lovely time of year to be in It's a pleasure. It's a little colder in Atlanta, Georgia. Yeah. Well, we'll get you back home soon enough. But thanks again for coming. Glad you made Thanks for bringing me in. Yeah. So you've been in the industry now for 30 plus years. Started back in the 90s, early 90s with AT &T Bell Labs. I started in 90s, so it's almost 35 years. It's unbelievable how the time's flown. Yeah.
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What do you think is the biggest change in the last 35 years that you've seen in fiber optics? I've seen a lot of changes. I've seen changes where fiber optic had technical issues when it was first being made. We had PMD issues. We had bubbles. We had difficulty splicing. So in the early 90s, I guess it was the transformation of making it a reliable technology.
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I think now it's ubiquitous. So we've seen it all the way transfer from replacing. When I first started with, with OFS, it was the largest fiber and copper plant in the, in the U S or world. can't recall. And copper just completely went away. And they focused on optical fiber and optical fiber, you know, is, is where we are now. Yeah. What do you think, what do you think is more exciting times, you know, in
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say in the dot com bubble, know, late nineties, early two thousands or, or now with all the broadband expansion. think it's now because I started back, I think it was 2001 when the fiber to the home council first formed and look where we are now. We've got tremendous amounts of funding through bead. We've got private investment. We've got people realizing in the U S and elsewhere that you need fiber to serve every citizen, reduce the digital divide.
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to empower communities to grow. Yeah, so it's it's that realization I think that's gonna take us to the next level. You know, I look back and I've said this many times on the show here, but you know, I live in Little Town Slater, Iowa and our local phone company Huxley Telephone did the it was the first fiber of the home in the state and I think it was in it was either 2001 or 2002 and so I've been spoiled, you know for all these years and
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It's hard for me to believe how many people still don't have reliable internet. You're one of the few. mean, think about it. Until recently, it was only the major cities that had the technology, had the fiber out of the reciprocal broadband. Everyone else was still, nothing wrong with cable, but everyone was just getting cable. And now it's transforming. Yeah. And even now, the early stages of fiber to the home,
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A lot of that was a triple play deployment too, right? So they're doing internet phone and TV. And it's amazing how fast the TV service has just gone. So now it's all subscription based. You've got YouTube and all those other offerings. So it's crazy how much that's changing. So today you're director of business development at Dura-Line. Is that correct? I am. I am.
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What does that role entail? What's that look like? What I've been doing is I've been trying to look at where we are in the industry with conduit, with micro conduit, and trying to look at how to take that yet to another level. So I've been focusing on, I mean, where we are right now is, know, Dura-Line is the global leader in fiber, in conduit, micro conduit. It's ubiquitous everywhere. And it's, there's so many miles, millions and millions of miles globally.
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And going forward, it's going to continue to proliferate along with all the funding, the fibers going in forward. So what we're looking to do is we're looking to take this technology and explore other opportunities to be used along utilities other than bandwidth. Yeah. So let's get into that. you have, you kind of have a pretty wide freedom with your role to chase different technologies and,
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work with other companies to kind of bring Dura-Line into the loop, right? You're a big part of the infrastructure that takes place. you've been on a mission now to promote optical sensing. And I don't think anybody really knows what that is. And that's part of problem, Tim. Yeah. tell us what fiber optic sensing is and what it can do.
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What are the possibilities? Sure. So as you know, optical fiber is throughout the world being used primarily for bandwidth. It's being placed along roads. It's being placed anywhere, bridges, right aways, aerial. What fiber is capable of doing is so much more right now in terms of just bandwidth. The technology of sending laser pulses down a fiber and receiving on the other end, that's basically broadband, right? Yep.
05:56
If you use alternate technologies, you're able to actually send laser pulses down a fiber and utilize the fiber as a sensor along its whole entire distributed length. So it's called distributed fiber optic sensing. There are several different forms of it. There's acoustic forms where you're able to hear perturbations and noises in the ground caused by a myriad of things. There's temperature types where you can actually monitor temperatures under the ground and monitor
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Conductor temperatures electric utilities and then there's strain types where you're actually able to look at the flexure of a bridge or things like that so what the technology has been around for a couple decades really and the technology is able to Leverage the optical fiber that's in the ground and use it for another purpose So that blows my mind a little bit. So how does a piece of glass? Sense temperature, okay, it's it's well
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Let's start with acoustics first because that's easiest to explain. So if you have a conduit on the ground and you have a optical fiber cable inside that conduit with glass inside of course, super absorbance, something in the ground like an excavator or someone walking nearby generates an acoustic signal. That acoustic signal or vibration travels from the device through the ground, through the conduit, into the outer jacket of the cable, all the way to the glass.
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When the glass receives the vibration, it causes a little bit of micro strain. That micro strain actually occurs close to where the activity is occurring. And by sending laser pulses down the fiber, you're able to locate where the activity is and you're able to actually classify what type of activity is happening. Based on how big or small the Yeah, so in a right of way, for example, if there was an excavator coming by to do some work.
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You're able to actually determine within about 10 meters along the linear length of the fiber where that excavator is and you're able to see it's an excavator versus a Moose walking by for example, it's that crazy Wow Yeah now in the temperature side since you asked about temperature you're able to actually in a similar way With a different type of scatter we won't get into monitor the relative temperature of let's say a power conductor so if you had a power conductor under the ground with
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with cables inside of it, you're actually able to tell whether the temperature is going up or down. That's incredible. That's incredible. So what kind of, what kind of facilities, I mean, do we want to protect? Where would, I mean, where does this play for? So are you familiar with the common ground Alliance? No. Common ground Alliance is an organization. They're a nonprofit. They track.
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what's happening in terms of cuts that happen in the US. I think the statistic is that every year, and this is an unbelievable number, $30 billion of direct and indirect damage occurs by either telecoms cutting into utilities, utilities cutting into telecoms, or excavation like that. So that's the damage we want to prevent. It causes life safety issues. It causes loss of bandwidth or
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Service, right? So those are the types of incidents in general we'd like to try to minimize. So what are the biggest challenges with fiber optic sensing now? Awareness. People understanding. It's awareness and it's a realization that it's a technology right now that's ready for prime time. And it's an awareness that it's been deployed for a couple of decades along border security.
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deployed along oil and gas pipelines. But where it's really exciting right now, you ask where do we want to protect? We want to protect the utilities, the energy infrastructure that's about to go in the ground. I mean, you know as well as I that AI is driving data center growth and data center growth drives what data transmission needs and also energy needs. there's above and beyond all the spending we're doing now for fiber. There's going be a huge impetus in the world and the US primarily.
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to put in more energy infrastructure. We have to upgrade. As we're upgrading, this provides an opportunity to make it more resilient and more sustainable. Everyone's worried about grids going down. In a cold day like this in Kansas City, you wouldn't want your power to go down, right? So power goes down for a lot of reasons. It goes down because people accidentally cut into things. And if you had a sensor in place to monitor and detect that and try to prevent it from happening, that's pretty powerful. Yeah, that's incredible.
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Where else could it go? I assume like a DOT, this would play very well for traffic and those types of things. Sure. So in the DOT, while we're putting bandwidth everywhere.
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all the DOTs are putting fiber and conduit adjacent to their highways. And they're doing this primarily through bead funding or through DOT separate funding to try to provide bandwidth along their highways and to provide the connectivity they need to connect all their peripherals. Whether they be microwave sensors, whether they be induction loops, basically connective stuff. That's a great opportunity also for this technology because this technology, as incredible as it sounds,
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with one fiber on one side of the road can actually detect traffic in both directions and give you speed congestion and actually detect avalanches. That's incredible. So I guess help me with that. If you've got a four lane interstate, you put the fiber cable right down the median in the middle. That's one way to do it. Or does it matter how critical is the placement of the fiber versus what you're trying to detect? So I'll give you a case in point.
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I did some work with Utah Department of Transportation. They had fiber that was put in 15 years ago and that fiber in some cases was right next to the road. In other cases it was down an embankment or behind concrete. Where it's behind acoustic barriers, you're not going to get great signal. If you're within, I'm just going to throw out a number, 10 or 20 meters to the side of the road.
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you're actually going to get a really nice detection of the vehicle acoustics going across the road for both sides. So ideally, going forward, if you're aware of this technology, you would try to put the fiber and conduit close to the road where it could receive the vibrations from both sides. Okay. So theoretically then, um, so
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I guess help me understand how it works. if I'm trying to monitor traffic, does it just take a while to get a baseline of what normal is to this sensor? What you would do is you would look at your hut positions along your highway.
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and you have racks of equipment inside each of those. You would utilize the highly developed hardware and software, put it in the racks, you would attach it either by fusion splicing or by just a connector to the passive network that already exists. And within just a day or so, you would baseline out, you identify with GPS locations where the fiber is, because sometimes fiber has loops.
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So you have more linear length than actually the linear route of the fibers. You identify your locations along the highway. Then you're good to go. You're basically at that point in time. So would you physically go out and test like, I don't know, you go out of the sledgehammer and bang on the road and... That's exactly right. And you look at it and you're like, okay, you're right there. So I'll tell you about the Fiber Optic Sensing Association. So last two years I chaired, I'm a member of them. There are a lot of members of the Fiber Optic Sensing Association that you know.
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like the Cornings and the fiber cable players and all the technology providers. What we do is we talk about how to provide the technology for applications like DOT. So the practitioners of this technology, the ones who develop the technology, they have the algorithms and the software already established. What you just described is exactly how it works. You put this in the hut, you go out and you tap along the location and you validate the location of the linear fiber.
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Back to my splicing days, if we had a cut or whatever and we were trying to find it, you might go to a splice case and open up and just bend a fiber and see where it dropped on the O-GDR and you could kind of pinpoint. Unless it's bending sensitive fiber, then you have a problem, Yeah, then you got to do something different. But back then, that wasn't an issue. So, getting back to the technology. So this technology has been used for a couple of decades. It's been used along borders. It's been used to oil and gas.
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but with respect to transportation and with respect to utilities, and that includes gas, water, and electric, and with respect to telecom itself. It hasn't been fully deployed just because people haven't really fully tested it and haven't convinced themselves that it's ready now, and it really is. I the telecom specific, I would think that, you middle mile and even long haul providers would...
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be begging to use this, you know, because they can afford, you can't have a long haul fiber cut and not cost a lot of people a lot of money. So I'll tell you my story on telecom. So telecom for years, there've been a couple of tier ones who've been really looking at this technology.
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And they were trying to look at the technology to justify it, just using on the route without using it for other reasons, just to protect the routes. You know, telecom has a lot of redundancy. So unless you have a long middle mile route or a route that should never go down, in a lot of cases, telecom has designed a robust system. But what's happened is people are now exploring the applications in other areas. So telecom is saying, wow, not only could I protect my infrastructure,
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but I could offer this as a service perhaps to protect other utilities and monetize the fiber in a different way than just Broadcom. So to that end, there's now an ITU standards working group looking at all the advantages and how to deploy this technology. So telecom is actually laser focused now, pun intended, in terms of trying to, or maybe pun intended, in terms of trying to look at how to apply this.
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In my opinion, little lack of knowledge, I guess, I would see probably one of the biggest challenges as, you know, it seems like there's a whole array of groups or entities that could benefit from it, but certain individuals that own the actual fiber. So how do we get all of those entities together to actually benefit each other?
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How does that work? To date myself, that's the $64,000 question. That's a big challenge. So, you know, I'll start with at the top with smart cities. Everyone talks about smart cities and they talk about the applications that can occur through a smart city. That requires tremendous coordination. Smart cities start with smart infrastructure. And how do you get someone at a municipal level to say, wow, I'm going to bring all the parties together. I'm going to bring the utilities in, the telecoms in.
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and we're going to have an owner or a broker of this technology and we're going to make it work. Very difficult. A lot of times you can't even get the different entities within the city to do, to work So let's flip that on its head. Start on the other end. Who tends to benefit most from this technology starting? Let's look at electric utility. Electric utility has a responsibility to the constituents to keep the power on.
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Sure, they have a responsibility not to have people have a life safety events and get hurt so an electric utility Being aware of this technology and about to deploy an infrastructure Wants to have that infrastructure be as reliable and sustainable as possible They are one of the probably the first adopters of this of this new technology where they will be able to implement this and position conduit and fiber
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Not for the purposes of broadband, but for the purposes of damage prevention, monitoring their conductors and other things. Also, another early adopter are going to be call centers. Call centers, what do they do? They live in each state as an entity. Again, going back to the Common Ground Alliance, those 811, dialed before you, big folks, they're trying to reduce damages for their member companies. They have member companies that are all the utilities and other types of
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infrastructure players as part of them. They're relying on them providing the maps and the locations so that when someone wants to do a construction job, they don't hit things. They go out and they probe, you're familiar with all that, right? Now there are call centers that saying, wow, what if I could add even more value to my end customers by encouraging my utilities to put this technology in so I can actually determine whether or not it's a sanctioned 811 activity or not.
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So to get to your broader question, it's going to take a while before the awareness is at a level where everyone comes together and says, wow, I'm a city, I'm doing an overbuild or I'm an open access builder. Everyone's coming together. You have to start with the people that are going to benefit initially. Yeah. That seems like the biggest challenge. So I know you're on a couple of boards of some other, you know, nonprofit associations like the fiber opting sensing association, FOSA.
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What does a group like that do? Okay, so yeah, let me describe a couple organizations. What I'm trying to do, obviously, as we just discussed, is create awareness. Sure. So the Fiber Optics Sensing Association, they've been around since 2017. Okay. They're a nonprofit out of Washington, DC, and their mission is to educate people and to influence end users into potentially adopting this technology and also mention information like this to our people that legislate.
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so that they can implement and promote this technology. So that organization's comprised of fiber optic cable providers, people who install, like Ditchwitch and others, and people who provide this technology. So we have technology outreach groups that are trying to take this message out there and say, it's a vetted technology, works very, very well. Let's look at other use cases and other applications. So that's been working very well.
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There's another organization and that's the organization I chaired for a couple of years. Okay. And now I'm actually setting up an advisory council there where I'm trying to bring in industry leaders from each of these vertical markets to advise how to scale and how to adopt this within their particular, you know, genre of activities. Then there's another interesting organization called the Alliance for Innovation and Infrastructure. They are a, also a nonprofit based out of DC and they're a nonpartisan
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a funded group that is trying to promote damage reduction, energy infrastructure resilience and sustainability, transportation advantages. So there's a lot of synergies out there. There are groups where the awareness is coming to fruition about how important it is to protect our infrastructure going forward that's already in the ground, then how important it is going forward to protect what's about to be built.
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You know, what makes CBM different is our ESOP. We're an employee-owned company. Our employees, we always say, act like an owner. Everybody's empowered to do the right thing for the customers, for the manufacturers. We serve the utility market, the commercial industrial market, and the communication market here in the Midwest. If you need representation from an awesome firm with great sales folks, look no further than CBM. You can find us here at cbmrep.com.
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I just had another thought go through my head as we're sitting here in Kansas City. You they've got the new little trolley system you'd mentioned. how does it not, at first we talk about transportation in like a DOT setting, but how does that, I'm assuming you could probably just track all the trains right through. Yeah. So rail is an interesting one. Again, the US is, Europe has done a lot more of this than the US.
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So there are systems right now in place in Europe where the technology is being used for rail. Let me tell you what it can do for rail. It's pretty phenomenal. Not only can it just track speed trains. Most of the rail already, you know, they've got their own fiber down their rides away as it is. it's analogous to DOT in that there's fiber adjacent to it. And rail is interesting in that they have a lot of individual sensors that for obvious safety reasons monitor things. Yeah. Right. But track brakes and wheels that
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go wrong, where you want to look at the preventative maintenance of a train before something bad happens. This is another great application because we talked about acoustics, right? If a track were to crack or a wheel were to be out around, as the train is running down the track, you hear the normal level of noise and then you hear something that goes wrong. The preventative maintenance aspects are incredible for this because above and beyond tracking speed and when things are going to arrive,
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You can tell when maintenance needs to proactively step in so nothing bad happens. You've seen as many as I, in Ohio I think there were a bunch of train derailments and oil spilling out or worse chemicals, right? That could be mitigated if you're able to have a system in place that can detect early on that something's wrong. Yeah, we had a derailment in Iowa just a couple years ago right outside of Carlisle.
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It was coming over, or it did come over a bridge. yeah, that's crazy. What other groups? I mean, it sounds like this stuff could be put anywhere. Talk a little bit about the gas and water industry. you know, the value of, you know, there's pipelines going in all across. Some of them are very controversial.
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you know, if there's another level of safety aspect with putting a pipeline in, maybe that would put folks more So let me talk about buried pipes first. So pipes that are being put in now, there's a pretty high percentage of them that are actually looking at putting in conduit adjacent to the pipe, either strapped on a pipe or within a meter away or so, to do exactly what we're talking about. There's also a huge opportunity for existing
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brownfield pipes that are buried under the ground now, because what's happening, they're corroding and they're going to have a finite lifetime. At some point in time, they're going to leak, they're going to cause problems. So companies are actually developing technology to be able to safely put conduit and fiber adjacent to pipelines that are live so that you can actually then have a place in a situation where you can monitor and know when things are going to go wrong. So oil and gas pipelines, gas pipelines are analogous. I mean, gas pipelines when just
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like when you have an electrical problem, people die, gas pipelines, they explode. So the gas pipeline industry, just like the electrical industry, will be and should be looking at this technology to protect their assets going forward. Now, most gas, I think the statistic is 80 % or more, is underground for obvious reasons, whereas electrical is kind of the flip. In some cases, it's aerial and then people are undergrounding it. So gas pipelines underground,
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are even more suitable for this application right now than electrical until electrical undergrounds. Now water, what's statistic I heard the other day, know water scarcity exists all around the world, especially in California and other places like that. 30 or 40 % of water in large water mains is lost. It's lost through leaks, it's lost through valve problems or leaks where you can't find them. So water is another...
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either existing brownfield or greenfield application where you could detect very quickly where leaks are occurring and go fix them. The small town that I live in, have a lot of water main breaks, especially in the older part of town. Most of those are in the street, obviously, but there's also fiber to the home through town. Would it be feasible for...
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this could the city actually monitor the water close enough? You know, most of that fiber for the fiber of the home is, you know, in the right way. So would they be able to monitor the water as well with that? Or is it just all depend on where that's located? early on, said you thought this would be a great application for middle mile. Let me talk about middle mile versus right at the neighborhood fiber to the home. technology is most suited right now for longer routes because
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Right now at this point, going through splitters and through a PON network, you're not able to get the signal back effectively. So you're looking at longer routes. The short answer to your question is if it was adjacent to the water right now, it'd be a perfect application. What I would suggest is, know map sharing is an issue in this industry. The more we can look at maps and look where overlaps occur and where telecom has existing fiber now relative to other utilities.
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the better we'll be able to use existing infrastructure to make it happen. If it's not existing, that's why I always say if you're going to do greenfield build, put it in. Yeah. Well, and that makes sense too, because I mean, how many rights away are getting full of fiber, you know, and you go back and dig. Now, wasn't there a dig once legislation that was passed here a year or two ago? It's been passed. It hasn't really been effectively leveraged. I was curious. And practiced.
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But this feeds to the Dig Once too. mean, let's start with conduit. Everything starts with conduit. So, let's start with conduit. So, the concept behind Dig Once, most of your audience knows, I'm sure, is that if you're going to open up a trench and it costs 70 % or more of your total cost for installation on the labor opening the trench, let everyone know, let everyone have the opportunity to put in their stuff then, so you don't have to go back and do it later on. That's why Dura-Line has...
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They're micro conduits because micro conduits are a way of leveraging additional growth and capacity going forward. But the future path in and get more, you know, more ducks and smaller footprint. So this is dig once on steroids. Yeah. You're basically putting in electrical gas or water infrastructure. You're opening up for pennies on the dollar. You're able to put in a small conduit or a large conduit, depending on what your needs are, to monitor that asset going forward.
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That's the time to do it. You don't want to build out the entire US energy infrastructure and then say, oh, wow, this technology is amazing. I really wish I would have put it close and there's no telecom route next to it. Well, that was my thought too, like going back to gas. You know, got an underground pipeline that was put in 20 years or further ago. How could you safely put the fiber in near a pipeline now, you know, an existing pipeline?
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I would think there'd be some risk involved. So that's a conundrum. And the conundrum is that to detect a small orifice leak of a pipeline, pressurized gas or oil, it makes a noise when it comes out, right? You actually want to have your conduit and fiber within about a meter.
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the pipe. However, to put that conduit and fiber a meter from the pipe and it's live, if you're not exactly sure where you are, you run the risk of an explosion or something else. So I'm not going to get into proprietary stuff, but I know a couple companies are working at how to do that with very sensitive technologies to know where the pipe is, know where the installation equipment is. If that's able to be cracked, and I think it's very soon to be done. Is there a way to put the fiber inside the pipe?
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In an oil and gas pipeline, I learned more about oil and gas in the last five years than I ever knew. There are pigs and such that scour the pipe in order to clean it out occasionally. You'd have to put it in such a way that it doesn't get damaged inside the pipe over time. But in a gas or a water pipeline, as long as you can insert it, absolutely. So you could put it inside. There are actually companies out there that have a business of
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going and valving in water pipelines and putting in a conduit inside the potable water with a potable compatible conduit coming out the other one. And now they're monitoring for water leaks. And guess what? They just provided another bandwidth path for a city. That's incredible. Before we get into some other stuff, is there any other thing on sensing that you want to get off your chest?
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any other thing in Sensei. I really appreciate is your passion for it and where did that develop that you just became so passionate about Now that's a nice broad question. So I'm a plastics material scientist by training. the first thing that got me... Nerd alert.
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Nerd alert. First thing that, yeah, don't tell my friends at the gym. The first thing that got me excited about it was formulating materials. That was my first nerd alert thing, right? And then from that, back at AT &T Bell Labs, I went into optical fiber with LUCI and OFS. So then optical fiber was super cool and wasn't ubiquitous back then, but then it was. Then the next thing was, okay, what does this optical fiber go into?
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I went to Dura-Line. It's the conduits, it's the technology there, whether it's under the ground or whether it's inside of a building with riser rated and fire retarded type materials, you know. And then the question is, okay, this infrastructure is there for broadband. It's reducing the digital divide. What's next? What's you're the type of guy that just likes shiny new cool things. I like driving innovation. Yeah. I like trying to make the next thing happen. And
32:51
Infrastructure with micro conduits under the ground is pretty smart. Yeah. But what's really smart is you take that for the purposes of bandwidth and you expand it to something else and you do all the things we're talking about. do security, you do situational awareness, you do preventative maintenance, do structural, know, bridges fall down, Yeah. you, whether or not you hit them with your ship, they, mean, you could actually know when, when the preventative maintenance is needed.
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on a bridge by having fiber strapped onto the bridge and looking at the flex over time. That's another application. There are tons of application with both the existing infrastructure and with new build infrastructure. People just have to look at the business case. Yeah. So speaking of the business case, my assumption is that cost is a challenge or is that? It's changing. It's getting better? I mean, the companies that have driven this technology are not large companies.
33:49
So they have amazing technology, they've done amazing research, and the cost for these units and software used to be a little on the high side. What's happened is... As really any technology... Any technology, yeah. When you have early adopters and you got to start to scale, the cost drops. So what's happened is, the equipment has become multifunctional. So instead of, for example, a box shooting down a laser in one direction, you may have a multi-port system where it has three four or five or six or more ports.
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in your architecture, can plop it in one location. Now you're, you're leveraging multiple routes, right? Yeah. So that's, that's been a tremendous impact in terms of lowering the cost. But the key thing is stop looking at the technology and look at how it improves the, all the other costs you have in your system. I'm all about total solutions. So take a DOT, for example, you have cameras, you have microwave sensors, you have induction loops.
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You have the necessary for traffic counting, necessary for cameras. If you implement this along a road effectively, let's say you reduce those peripherals by 10, 20%. You've reduced your maintenance costs, you've reduced your capital costs, you've reduced your truck rolls. The business case is there to put this along the highways. People just don't realize it. Same with utilities. What if five or 10 % of your routes are critical routes and they go down, you get damaged every year?
35:13
Yeah. Somebody in that large investor owned utility or whomever knows that if I could stop flying my drones over and having the guy check it every day, and if I could know for sure 24 seven that I could prevent a problem from happening, that it's going to pay for itself. Yeah. So that's, that's the issue. The issue is awareness and it's, and it's just doing the business case. Yeah. And it seems like, uh, you know, most of the, most of the new infrastructure projects, you know, it's, uh, you know, it's capital expense.
35:42
And a lot of times the maintenance on the back end isn't really figured. Or they're not talking to each other. You've got a capital expense group within a company, you've got operational expense, you've got damage prevention. This gets back to your earlier point. How do you get all those entities to sit at the table and say, wow, I can benefit from my damage preventative. I can benefit from life safety. I can benefit from the regulators. I could benefit in terms of how much capital equipment I have to deploy. So you have really...
36:11
your challenges is just on a much larger scale, it's essentially the same as trying to sell future paths to a guy that's putting in, you know, two inch and a quarters. Yes. Right. Yeah. It's the same. It's the same philosophy. It's just a larger scale and more entities. It's even more complicated story to tell. Yeah. But it's the same thing. It's happening. It's going to happen. It's just, you start with awareness. You start with interested parties. You start with early adopters and then no one necessarily wants to be the first.
36:40
Especially in the utility industry. Especially in the utility. They want to try it when it's been working for 20 plus years. and it has been working, not ubiquitously across large utility networks, but in many spots within the utility industry. So those stories have to come forward. People have to see with confidence that it's driving all the issues. Yeah. So let's take a little turn. You'd mentioned the gym.
37:10
And I know you had chosen your hotel here in town based on the gym facilities. So that tells me a lot about you, what is, just on a personal level, on a work level, what does fitness mean to you and how big of a part of your life is that? And frankly, what can you tell us?
37:35
a guy that's lost his motivation over the last year to get back we have another hour? Yeah. So it's funny you hit on this, but fitness is a huge part of my life. So for 45 years, I've been hitting the gym consistently since I was 17 years old. That's incredible. Yeah. And so I've always been, this is why you can't tell my gym friends my technical background, because I have a different persona there. I joke, you know, but seriously, I'm a big proponent of fitness.
38:04
And if you want to go there, I'll tell you my tip. I'll tell you my tips. Let's hear it. So, so I, I do weights five days a week and I do, I do Peloton cardio two days a week. So I work out every day and I've been doing this for a long time. It's just building the habit. it's it's, know, like Arnold Schwarzenegger says, you know, it's part of his life. He can't imagine having a day where he is an exercise. So I do that, but I added a new twist and here's a tip for your viewers, right?
38:33
I researched intermittent fasting. Yeah. And six years ago, I looked into it and I said, not only is it, it's not a diet, it's good for mental acuity, longevity, all these other things. I started doing 18 hour fasting every day. Okay. And I'm it every day. So what does that schedule look like? It means about 1.30 or 2, I have my lunch and about seven o'clock at night, I have my dinner. Yep. And in between, I have a very large protein shake.
39:01
Okay, a afternoon snack is a protein snack. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, you know, if people, if your viewers want look into it, it's a very healthy thing to do. Yeah. For your, you know, it prevents a lot of doesn't mean you can eat whatever you want in those. It does not. That's a myth. That's my struggle. It's a myth. People always ask that, can I eat anything I want? No. What it does is it forces you.
39:25
to healthier in that window because you got to get your protein in if you care about exercise. And so you eat healthier for the six or whatever hours you're eating every day. So I've been doing that long time. think it gives you energy and gets you motivated to drive smart infrastructure in the industry. Well, that is a tie in. No, seriously. It's a great thing. yeah. Well, yeah, I know. So when I turned 40,
39:55
I started working out a lot and kept it up for nine years. just last year there's something snapped and it's just fizzled away and I'm 20, 25 pounds heavier now than I had been for the last nine years. And I know it's...
40:21
It's, I don't know. I know there's gotta be a Here's the solution. You dial it in like a meeting in your calendar every day. You look at your day and you go, wow, I got So how do you do that on the road, traveling? You pick hotels with gyms and pelotons and you get up early and you sacrifice a little sleep. All right. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. We'll have you back in a year and we'll see where I hit the scales at.
40:51
But I turned 50 in May. yeah, it's been a challenging year. We've had some personal stuff that's happened and we've got all the excuses in the world. 50 is young, I turned 63 in June. Yeah, well, that's awesome. I've got an uncle that I've spent a bunch of time with when I was, well, frankly, all my life, but he's the one that got me into hunting and fishing and all of that stuff.
41:20
He actually shot his first bull elk when he was 80. And, uh, you know, he gets up and hits the, hits the, um, treadmill and was it self-defense or was he trying to just, uh, no, he was on purpose. was trying to, but, uh, um, so, yeah, I think it's just years of habit.
41:39
And I know I've got to get back on that. I've always told people it's okay to be compulsive and obsessive if you if you focus in the right areas Yeah, so I'm a compulsive exerciser. I could be compulsive something else and that would not be good Yeah, I guess that makes a lot of sense as long as you you focus it on the the right side of the spectrum Yeah, and a compulsive smart infrastructure promoter Well, that's awesome, how do you handle
42:09
know, managing then, you know, family life outside of work versus all the travel. wife. That's the key, it? I met my wife in September 4 of 1982. And I asked her to dance at Cornell when she was a, she and I both went there. Yeah. And so we still celebrate that holiday. Yeah. And so we've been together 42 years.
42:34
and married 36. That's awesome. So yeah, she is my rock and I highly recommend that. Yeah. If you're able to find one. Yeah. Yeah. I've been pretty fortunate myself. So, but that is, that is a key. You can't do it alone. That's right. For sure. So other than your wife, what other important figures have you had? Any specific mentors that, that come to mind?
42:58
You know, it's a funny thing. My wife and I were asked that question the other day. We have this little book that we, we every day are asked a question. We answer over the dinner table. We both looked at each other and said, you know, we haven't really had mentors ourselves that we, role models we look up to, but I've had a village of people supporting me my whole life in incremental ways, but I can't say there's one specific individual. They've all been.
43:22
For different phases of my life, and I think that happens with most people, you have people that help you through different parts. Early on it was my parents, then it was my friends and my colleagues. What I enjoy more now is trying to help other people. I I see people, whether they be at the gym or whether they be technical, who are early in their careers, who are trying to shape themselves into whatever they want to be.
43:51
And that's one of the reasons why I join some of these nonprofits now because when you get to be 63, you think about giving back and you think about trying to pass on because that's what it's all about, right? It's about passing on and making an imprint on people where it could benefit them. Yeah, that's certainly the right attitude and the right perspective. How about you? That's great. All of my uncles...
44:17
There's different phases in my life where they've all had a pretty good impact on my early childhood, raising me, obviously my dad. You'd mentioned Ditchwich earlier. My dad, when I was growing up, he was a salesman for Ditchwich for I think about 20 years. And he's always...
44:42
Super fun dude, you he's always joking around. All of my family or all the males in my family are known for their whistles. They make, I'm the first let down in the whole bunch of them. I can't do the locker whistle still to this day. But you you could know who it was in a room just by what chirp it was, you know, if it was my dad or one of the uncles or whatever. But so a lot there.
45:13
know, work wise, you know, oddly Steve Scudder that I met Steve a long, long time ago when we were working together at a contractor, we were splicing together and, you know, worked with him long enough, become friends and et cetera. And I left and got into sales and shortly thereafter he'd got into sales and he'd went to American Polywater.
45:42
to work. And he's actually the reason I ended up here at CBM. So he had came down, met with CBM about them repping for him. And in the meantime, they said, well, we're looking for somebody in Iowa. And so he recommended me for this position. And 17 years later, here I am. it's folks like that that have your back when...
46:09
when they're looking out for you. I've got some, you know, a pretty good friend group at home as well that, you know, what's funny is like just being a male. A lot of times you want to kind of, you kind of make fun of your buddies or you pick on each other, but it's really hard to support each other sometimes. And I've seen that change over the last few years where we're more supportive of each other instead of.
46:39
know, jokingly trying to bring people down. Yeah. And that's made a big difference in perspective. I a thought while you were talking about mentors too. I've been really lucky almost every one of my bosses without exception has given me kind of free rein. Yeah. As long as I was contributing to the company, never been micromanaged in my life. Yeah. Which helps a lot. you're certainly in that role now. Like you've got, um, like an empty open canvas, you know, with, with Thurline to chase.
47:09
opportunity and promote all this new awesome technology. Duraland customers and everyone loves to hear what their micro conduit can do beyond bandwidth. So that's really powerful because you want to maximize your investment. You want to maximize your ROI. You want to maximize the utility of your infrastructure. Why not?
47:33
add on 10 more uses, above and beyond bandwidth to your infrastructure. Well, I love the passion and I appreciate you coming on today and keep spreading that message. The more people know about it, the more it'll, I'm sure it's going to come around because you're not going to quit pushing it. Thanks for inviting me. I really enjoyed it. That's awesome. Thank you. All right.
48:02
Thanks again, Paul. We really appreciate you coming in and educating us on fiber optic sensing. It truly is an amazing product and a new technology that's going to help a lot of folks over the years. We're proud to have you come in and help you support all your efforts in educating folks and bringing awareness to what's available. Really appreciate your passion. We hope you succeed in bringing this more to fruition. So I'm sure you will, but thanks again.
48:32
Remember, if you need help with a project or looking for representation for a product here in the Midwest, look no further than CBM. You can find us here at CBMRep.com. As always, thanks for joining us on Power the Network. Until next time, we'll see you next time.
