LI Company, Facebook, Developing Robot To Install Internet Cables

HAUPPAUGE, NY — ULC Robotics, a Hauppauge-based technology developer, is collaborating with Facebook to develop a robot that can install fiber-optic cables for internet service, the company announced. Engineering teams at ULC Robotics said the robot that can crawl along medium-voltage power lines and cross obstacles to wrap fiber-optic cables around power lines.

More than 3.5 billion people globally are still not connected to the internet, according to Facebook Engineering. Facebook Connectivity, working with the ULC Robotics and several other partners, has aimed to develop "a robotic solution that can drastically reduce the cost of fiber installation."

Pilot programs are anticipated to launch in 2021, according to ULC Robotics. The project has been in development for the past few years.

The robot, in tandem with innovations in fiber-optic cable design, would use existing electrical infrastructure to "dramatically" lower the cost of deploying fiber cables. If it works, fiber-optics cables will be effectively and sustainably set up within a few hundred meters of much of the world’s population, according to Karthik Yogeeswaran, of Facebook Engineering.

"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," Yogeeswaran said in a statement.

Average data usage per person is growing 20 to 30 percent annually, which means current bandwidth-limited technologies have been pushed to their capacity limits, according to Facebook Engineering. To meet the demands, technology has been gradually upgraded by mobile network operators from 2G to the impending 5G. Meanwhile, wire line access networks have moved from DSL and coaxial to fiber-optic cables in the home, according to Yogeeswaran.

"Regardless of the access technology used, to support the increased capacity served in a region, fiber must be brought from the backbone closer to the end user," Yogeeswaran said.

NetEquity Networks will be Facebook's first partner in rolling out the technology, according to the social media giant. Facebook said it doesn't have a financial stake in NetEquity, a San Francisco-based infrastructure sharing startup whose mission it is to "make high speed Internet access affordable for every human within a decade," according to its website.

ULC Robotics is headquartered at 88 Arkay Drive in Hauppauge.