UK water supplier Southern Water is turning existing Openreach fiber-optic cables into underground leak sensors for its pipe network. According to The Register, the company has started trialing a system from Lightsonic.
The cables belong to Openreach, the infrastructure arm of BT, which is also retiring its copper network. Lightsonic’s system tracks tiny changes in how light travels through these cables, picking up vibrations from leaks in the ground nearby. Machine learning separates those signals from traffic, roadworks and other background noise. That lets the system pinpoint where the water is escaping.
Lightsonic says precise leak locations help engineers investigate problems and fix pipes faster. The company claims its technology already saves more than four million liters of water a day across 650 km of the UK’s water network.
Southern Water isn’t the first British water company to try the approach. Back in March, Affinity Water, which serves parts of southern England, tested the same system with Lightsonic and Openreach. Southern Water says that experience convinced it to run its own trial.
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The trial follows one of the hottest and driest summers on record in the UK. Almost three-quarters of England is officially in drought, and the south is among the country’s most water-stressed regions. Southern Water hopes the trial will help it hit the leakage-reduction targets set by regulator Ofwat for 2030. Cutting losses should also ease pressure on reservoirs and reduce water abstraction, making the network more resilient to drought.
Southern Water provides water and wastewater services across parts of Hampshire, West and East Sussex, Kent and the Isle of Wight. “We’ve reduced leakage across our network for three consecutive years and continue to invest in innovative techniques and technologies to find and fix leaks even more effectively,” said Wayne Novelli, Southern Water’s leakage and network strategy manager. He added that the company had been impressed by the leakage-reduction metrics and proven success of Lightsonic’s technology.
Its record on wastewater is far less flattering. This week, a court fined Southern Water £2.4 million ($3.1 million) over several pollution incidents in Kent. That came after a £7.1 million ($9.4 million) fine in July for illegal sewage discharges that forced beaches in the Thanet area of Kent to close. Both cases were brought by the Environment Agency.
UK utilities and telecom companies often team up. In 2022, engineering firm Arcadis planned to test laying fiber inside water pipes in South Yorkshire. And in 2024, similar technology helped bring broadband to Papa Westray, one of the UK’s most remote islands, in the Orkney archipelago.
