Fibre characterisation has been a part of my career since I joined York Technology in 1983. York had developed the FCm 1000, the first automatic fibre characterisation machine. This mighty machine could measure all of the fibre’s critical parameters, including end face geometry, mode field diameter and refractive index profile, as well as perform optical time-domain reflectometer (OTDR) testing, spectral attenuation measurements and, for multimode fibres, find the modal dispersion.

Cartographers once drew dragons, sea serpents and other mythological creatures in uncharted areas of their maps, illustrating their anxiety about the unknown. Technologists are made of sterner stuff. When entering uncharted territory, they use roadmaps to navigate through calm waters towards common objectives.

In the wake of Google Access CEO Craig Barratt’s ‘Goodbye Access’ post on the Google Fiber blog, there are pundits left, right and centre predicting the end of Google Fiber. Barratt’s post tries to sound upbeat, but in essence he’s announcing that Google Fiber won’t be expanding further (pending a strategic re-evaluation), that people will be made redundant, and that he’s leaving. I don’t know Craig and can’t really comment on his tenure as Access CEO, but that doesn’t exactly sound like good news.

If you think practical quantum computers arriving within 5-10 years means you don’t need to worry about their impact on communication network security yet, you’re in for a nasty surprise. That’s according to Jane Melia, vice president of strategic business development at Canberra, Australia-headquartered quantum security system vendor QuintessenceLabs. Adopting new security technology takes at least two years, and that protection must often continue for more than five years, so ‘this deadline is actually very close indeed’, she warns.

Few industries experience as many evolutions – or indeed revolutions – as the communications industry. Driven by an ever-growing hunger for bandwidth, operators and service providers are increasingly turning to fibre to meet the needs of access networks and data centres of varying size and requirements. With a history that spans more than 40 years, CommScope has completed several transformational acquisitions that it believes have left the company in the strongest possible position to capitalise on these network demands.