Ask anyone who uses the internet nowadays, whether for business or pleasure, and they’ll confirm the leap forward that fibre optic has brought in terms of unprecedented qualitative improvements in internet connectivity. This is alongside analogous advances in all technological and telecommunications developments that require data transmission over land, with faster speeds, higher transmission capacities or bandwidth, greater flexibility in the supply of products and services, and more.

This, in turn, has had a direct impact on the devices and applications that are available to users, as well as their features and the doors they open in a wide variety of sectors related to digitalisation, including research and development, process and task automation, data-based management, app personalisation and much more. Fibre optic has earned itself a privileged place in our lives and in its own right.

Security, one of the key strengths of fibre optic

Increased connection capacities and ultra-fast data transmission already represent a strong enough pull towards fibre optic, but even more so because this method of data communication can guarantee another particularly sensitive concern for the entire web ecosystem: security.

Connectivity is guaranteed through fibre optic. There are no “traffic jams”, data blockages or line saturation events, information travels faster, with less latency and much further than it otherwise would down twisted copper cables. Furthermore, fibre optic reduces the risk of physical attacks or interventions by third parties – close to zero, in fact, if the information is encrypted – and isn’t susceptible to being affected by external factors, such as the weather.

Next steps: quantum fibre optic

Despite the incredible advances in connectivity that fibre optic represents, technology never stops looking to the future, nor do those working on security requirements and potential threats. In order to stay up to date and to be able to respond in a timely manner, experts have spent the last decade trying to improve fibre optic and fill in a few of its potential shortcomings.

In this sense, the answer lies in quantum computing and, as a result, in the fibre optic that moves through the ground within this field of particle physics. While current fibre experiences very low latency and not inconsiderable bandwidth, quantum fibre allows encrypted information to be sent at exponentially higher speeds, without latency and with the potential that every qubit – or quantum bit – can deal with various logical operations at the same time.

On the other hand, the quantum key distribution, or QKD, protocol makes hacking virtually impossible. Each quantum bit can be a one or a zero at the same time in “logical language”, and only acquires its final value when each block of data is decrypted. Qubits can’t be copied and even attempting to interfere with the information they contain in any unwanted way will alter the state of the information and destroy it. That means the security is virtually impregnable.

Work is already underway that has successfully connected two atoms separated by a distance of some 33km through quantum bonding using fibre optic. Despite the fact there remains a great deal of work ahead, structures are becoming more and more common that are based on quantum internet as a foundation and, in just a short space of time, we’ll soon be able to start talking about the fascinating scenario of an internet that moves faster than the speed of light itself.