Dark fibre

In this article on Quantum Cryptology for the masses it refers to an apparently new type of fibre optic system.  They call it Dark Fibre and it appears that if you have the money you can buy some of this fibre and the encryption kit to build your own Quantum Cryptology channel.

Sounds great, soon we will all have secure networks.  Well not quite.   It seems that this Dark Fibre is in fact only dark because although it has been installed to prepare for future bandwidth requirements it is not switched on yet.  Not on = No light = Dark.  

Now with more and more government and corporate snooping on our data and the financial and perception penalties involved if any data is lost it would not surprise me if many corporations need to protect their networks.  Hopefully not this way though as this could take a significant number of fibres off the network, so to speak, as each point to point connection needs a dedicated fibre.  So if you had three sites it would require a minimum of two to work but three to connect them together to provide a robust network.

Remembering that fibres we use now are shared between thousands of users this means that the future upgrades which were previously installed, and being installed now, are likely to be starved of the capacity previously calculated as necessary.  Massive fibre optics installs are taking place all over the country at the moment.   Bit of a problem there as we now how we normally underestimate usage of bandwidth anyway.

In the olden days, well now actually, most corporations and even governments use dedicated lines  with encryptors at both ends.   Similar to this new system.   However, Quantum Cryptology allows a much more secure connection and thus is clearly going to be an option seriously considered.

So let’s hope there are not too many corporations out there who need this higher level of security and that the encryptors on the standard, for now, dedicated lines can improve their security quickly or the road at the end of street will need to be dug up again pretty soon, they finished it just last week.    I hope they left plenty of space in the pipes this time for a lot more fibre.  Governments,of course, don’t need to worry about cost effectiveness and I could see a few of these going in for several classified systems under their control on recommendation from CESG as some systems really do need the highest security on them.

In the meantime let’s get rid of all the Dark Fibre by turning in on for our use.  Higher and higher bandwidth will be required as we connect everything together and pass more data, backup dynamically and set up more and better video conference calls.