Optellios, formally Optellium was launched in August of 2000 and raised venture capital Series A funding in early 2001 from Adams’ Capital Management and H.I.G. Ventures. The company was founded with the goal of establishing a leadership position in enabling high speed communications at 40Gbs and beyond by correcting for detrimental Polarization Mode Dispersion (PMD) distortions in communication links.
By 2004, the company received significant recognition as a leading provider of quality components in the polarization control and management area which it continues to provide for major companies in US and abroad, including fortune 500 companies. By mid 2004, Optellios aggressively sought to refocus its technology into the emerging security market and launched its first security product in the third quarter of 2004, a fiber-optic based intrusion detection system capable of locating the point of intrusion to within 10s of feet over perimeter runs as long as 60 miles. The first system was deployed at a commercial airport in late 2004, and since then has been deployed at government sites, power generation plants, and water treatment facilities. A number of other security products have been launched through the Fiber Patrol security division (www.fiberpatrol.com) of Optellios. While some of these products rely on the use of dedicated fibers, other products can use existing single mode data communication lines to detect physical tempering. Such a system has currently been deployed at one of the nations top military locations for detecting unauthorized fiber-taping of secure communication lines.
The companies’ technology is broad based; The Fiber Patrol division of the company focuses on converting the world of fiber-optic links into a world of sensors and using the existing fiber-optic data links not only for data and video traffic but integrating the sensor into the same cable. This configuration is currently in use at several of our customer sites, where a single fiber-optic cable is used as a location resolving intrusion sensor, a data communication link, as well as a medium for relaying video signals back to the control room. The sites can be remotely monitored through the Internet using customized database driven software capable of recalling alarm logs, video clips of intrusions and it has the capability of remote control of cameras and multiple sites monitoring from one or more locations.
