We’re excited to announce our new product and service offering CATE® (or Compression At The Edge)!

Anyone who has worked with data from Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) knows that this system can generate very large volumes of data very quickly and these can be cumbersome to deal with both in analysis and in the field. Developed in partnership with Deep Digital Cornwall, CATE addresses this by compressing the DAS data such that it is easier to store and can be transmitted from sites using limited internet connections.

Powered by MST’s proprietary DAS-SQUASH®, CATE can compress data volumes by factors of 5-50x this means:

  • Storage of much more data:  Onsite archives are optimized so you can store months of data when previously only days were possible
  • Efficient transmission:  All data or selected segments can be transmitted to the office or the cloud for analysis.
  • Transmission over limited connections: the reduced data volume means data can even be transmitted over a 4G.
  • Lower transmission and storage costs: Since the volume of transmitted data is lower
  • Low power usage: CATE is designed for low power usage meaning that the unit can be used in almost any setting.
  • It works with existing DAS data: Data can be compressed from a live stream produced by the interrogator or played back from an archive. Multiple data formats and input streams are supported.

The system can be administered remotely using a simple web interface, and data can be accessed from anywhere using a simple web API. Clearly, we’re very excited about the future of CATE as not only does it make existing DAS installations more effective, but it enables monitoring in places that otherwise would not be possible. MST has a number of demo CATE data sets, so, if you are interested in trying it out just get in touch.