Montana-based Adelos – A simple technology could secure the border for a fraction of the cost of a wall — but no one’s talking about it- “We’re way cheaper than the crap they’re talking about in terms of physical barriers.”

One Texas lawmaker, Rep. Will Hurd, has been arguing for years that stretching a fiber optic cable “from sea to shining sea” would do far more to secure the border than physical barriers.

“What we’re doing is we’re taking sound that is caused by things in the sky, on the ground, or subsurface — we’re converting those sound waves, that pressure, and we’re measuring how it impacts light in the cable itself, the fiber optic glass, and then we can convert that into acoustic information,” Adelos founder and chief technology officer Alex Philp told INSIDER. “You can hear all this stuff happening.”

businesses like Adelos have been waiting on tenterhooks for the government to release what’s called a “request for proposal” (RFP) detailing exactly what specifications the government needs. When and if that drops, companies like Adelos can submit their proposals on what the technology will do, and how it’ll be implemented.

Philp said there’s likely a lot of reasons why systems like his aren’t already in place along the US-Mexico border, and why the government is still hung up on a wall — chief among them being that the government is known for being slow-moving, especially when it comes to technology.