Deep within Britain's underground internet infrastructure, something fascinating is happening — artificial intelligence has taught it to listen for water.
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Water loss from leaks is a severe global problem. An estimated 30% of water in urban infrastructure is lost without ever being used.
That amounts to more than 100 billion cubic meters of water every year — wasted instead of put to use, and causing various forms of damage along the way.
We know fiber-optic networks as the communications infrastructure that carries digital data across the internet.
But a British startup has formed a partnership with a telecommunications provider and a water utility to make that infrastructure do something entirely different — detect leaks using artificial intelligence.
How does it work?
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The walls of optical fibers are not perfectly smooth. Under a microscope, you can make out tiny imperfections.
These imperfections cause a small fraction of the light traveling through the fiber to scatter back toward the fiber's starting point.
A pipe leaking water creates subtle vibrations in the ground, and those vibrations alter the pattern of the light waves reflected back from the fiber's imperfections. By connecting a monitoring unit to the end of the fiber, these patterns can be analyzed — including how long they take to reach the device — pinpointing the exact location along the line where a leak has been detected.
The significant challenge in this process is that the fibers are exposed to a great deal of background noise, such as road traffic above them or ground works nearby. To isolate water leaks, AI models trained to precisely identify the characteristic frequencies produced by water escaping from a faulty pipe are used to filter out that noise.
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The pilot was conducted across 650 kilometers and concluded with remarkable success.
The system identified more than 100 leaks, and repairing them led to savings of more than 2 million liters of water per day — or more than 700 million liters per year.
Optical fiber is existing, active infrastructure, which significantly reduces the time and cost required to deploy this technology at scale.
Israel is a world leader in water conservation, with losses currently estimated at around 7% per year — an impressively low figure compared to many other countries. Widespread adoption of this technology could help close the gap and prevent enormous waste in countries around the world.
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👋 Hi, I'm Shlomo Strauss — follow me for more content on science and technology.
Photo: Denny Müller