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RADAR™

Our fibres watch themselves. So we know where the fault is before you ring us.

RADAR — Remote Automated Detection and Reporting. Sicom’s own product. Sits in your comms room, watches every fibre in the network, and tells us exactly where on the route a fault is. Built in-house. On live networks today.

Talk to us about RADAR How it works
The problem RADAR was built for

A fibre cut without RADAR.

Fibre ducting and civils groundwork

A fibre cut without RADAR plays out like this. Network goes down. You ring your maintainer. They send an engineer to the comms room. The engineer plugs in an OTDR, sweeps the line, finds a loss event at — somewhere around 2.4km along the route.

Now they have to work out where 2.4km along the route lands. On the map. Often at night. Often in a road. Sometimes four hours later, sometimes longer, the dig has started.

RADAR shortens that to minutes.
RADAR™ sees this

What a live fibre looks like.

Light pulses through dark fibre at the bandwidth you choose. RADAR™ watches at 1650nm — outside the wavelengths the data is using — so it sees attenuation events the moment they happen. A bend. A trapped lead. A break. Before the network notices.

CHANNEL1650nm OOB
PULSES0
EVENTS0
STATUSNOMINAL
How it works

Out-of-band detection. GIS-mapped fault location.

RADAR is an out-of-band monitoring device that sits in your comms room or data centre.

01
The detection layer
It checks the condition of every fibre in the network every few seconds, comparing the current losses to a fingerprint we recorded at installation. When something changes — a bend, a trapped lead, a poorly seated optic, a break — we know.
02
1650nm, out-of-band
RADAR uses detection waves in the 1650nm bandwidth, which sits outside the wavelengths your live data uses. That means it can monitor fibres while they’re carrying traffic, without interrupting the service running over them.
03
The mapping layer
When we take on support for a network, we map the fibres into our in-built GIS system — we know the length of each fibre and the key points along the route. So when an attenuation incident is detected, we don’t just see “a fault.” We see a fault on a map. Down to the road, the chamber, the splice.
Five things RADAR does

The specification.

24/7 automatic monitoring

Every fibre, every few seconds, all day, every day.

Isolate root cause

Fibre or equipment. RADAR tells you which.

Protect against hackers / intrusion

Physical tampering with the fibre changes the loss profile. RADAR sees it.

Reduce time-to-repair

Fault location on a map. The dig starts in the right place, first time.

Secure enclosures

The hardware sits in tamper-evident enclosures in your comms room.

Illuminated fibre-optic network
Every fewseconds Every fibre in the network, checked against its installation fingerprint.
FAQs

The four things everyone asks.

You may own the fibre or have an exclusive-use lease but, either way, RADAR can be incorporated as part of your own service and doesn’t need permission from anyone else.
As part of the installation we map the fibres in your network to our in-built GIS system. We know the length of the fibre and plot key points in the route to build a fibre map.
That’s OK. RADAR uses detection waves in the 1650nm bandwidth which don’t affect the live data. We’ll just agree a planned maintenance window while we install a coupler on the live fibres in your data centres.
Yes — but now you can tell them exactly where the fault is and get it rectified quickly without SLA issues.
RADAR in production

Ask4, UK-wide. Eleven cities. One network.

Sicom delivered dark fibre to Ask4’s sites in York, Bath, Southampton, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Lancaster, Falmouth, Sheffield, Nottingham, Cardiff and Birmingham. Eleven cities. One network.

As the build progressed, RADAR went in alongside it. Total Care fibre support, every fibre monitored every few seconds, every site on the GIS map. If a fibre is touched anywhere in that network, we know before Ask4 picks up the phone.

Read the Ask4 UK-wide case study
Commercial framing

Bundled with Total Care.

How it’s priced
Total Support is offered at no cost for larger networks with long-term support agreements. For smaller networks and standalone deployments, we’ll price it directly.
What you’re buying
You’re buying the support contract. RADAR is the part of it you can see — the screen that shows every fibre being checked. It’s what makes our contract different from a carrier NOC’s “24/7 monitoring” line.
RADAR on your network

The support conversation starts the same way every quote does.

Postcode, bandwidth, current setup.

Talk to us about Support Service Support See RADAR on Ask4’s network
Or download a free guide
0800 861 1440