At a secret workshop in Ukraine’s north-east, where about 20 people assemble hundreds of FPV (first person view) drones, there is a new design. Under the frame of the familiar quadcopter is a cylinder, the size of a forearm. Coiled up inside is fibre optic cable, 10km (6 miles) or even 20km long, to create a wired kamikaze drone.
Capt Yuriy Fedorenko, the commander of a specialist drone unit, the Achilles regiment, says fibre optic drones were an experimental response to battlefield jamming and rapidly took off late last year. With no radio connection, they cannot be jammed, are difficult to detect and able to fly in ways conventional FPV drones cannot.
“If pilots are experienced, they can fly these drones very low and between the trees in a forest or tree line. If you are flying with a regular drone, the trees block the signal unless you have a re-transmitter close,” he observes. Where tree lined supply roads were thought safer, fibre optic drones have been able to get through.
Bidirectional transceivers (so both directions on a single fiber) can do 100 Gbit/s ethernet too. No way you’d do that for drones of course, but just to show how far you can get with a single fiber.
And for unidirectional we’re rapidly approaching 1.2Tb at the top end. 400Gb and 800Gb are becoming pretty standard in the datacenter world. Fiber is wild!
Yes, and that’s before muxing!
I need only 75 GHz of spectrum to send 400 Gbit/s through our country. We’ve currently got a link running between Zürich and Lugano (two amplifier sites in between, before and after the alps), and I’ve got 4400 GHz of usable spectrum with our currently deployed system, so if we needed it and spent like two million dollars we could deploy 23.2 Tbit/s within months, using just our normal commercial stuff, on a single fiber pair.