Vehicle counts, traffic slow-downs and other pieces of data central to traffic management may one day be gleaned from a city’s fiber-optic communications network.

Verizon and technology company NEC have been leading research into the concept of turning a fiber network into one big sensor, picking up vibrations and offering insight into the size of vehicles, their directions, speeds and more.

The telecom's fiber infrastructure, coupled with optical sensor technology and artificial intelligence software from NEC, has led to the kinds of traffic and other insights generally derived from strategically placed sensors trained to pick up this activity. The early “proof-of-concept” research by Verizon suggests this data could be collected from any point along the network.

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