This little known fact will help you win at Trivial Pursuit this Christmas: Fibre-optic technology, the backbone of the world’s internet networks, was not developed in Silicon Valley, but in a field in Suffolk at Adastral Park.

And to further your technology points, you could mention that it is home to BT’s research division, and has played host to some of the biggest breakthroughs in telecoms ever, including the development of fibre and the world’s first mobile data call.

The 400-acre site east of Ipswich, takes its name from the RAF motto Per Ardua ad Astra, as the site originally was an airport, an experimental aircraft testing site home to squadrons of Blenheim bombers and Spitfires in World War II. The flat Suffolk landscape made it a perfect site for the British Telecommunications labs in the 1960s, when the company was owned by the Post Office.

Adastral Park has since grown to become the Ipswich area’s biggest employer, with 3,000 BT staff and 1,000 workers from other companies, ranging from start-ups to the Chinese equipment giant Huawei. The site contains a closed-loop network that is the equivalent to the size of Belgium’s internet, while ten million British broadband lines and the country’s largest Wi-Fi network are managed within its boundaries.

But the reason we are talking about Adastral Park isn’t actually to help you win at Trivial Pursuit over the holidays. It is because Adastral Park’s finest engineers have confirmed that the next big breakthrough in telecommunications will likely be quantum communications, a process that harnesses subatomic particles to make telecoms networks impossible to hack. Data is sent across a network that requires ‘keys’ at both ends to decode it. This is achieved by sending a pulse of photons through the network to foil eavesdropping hackers. The UK government is pumping £270 million into the quantum industry in the hopes that the UK can compete with China, which is rapidly developing quantum communications.

But in bad news for all traditional phone line users, once quantum communications becomes commercially available it is really only going to help businesses that are using fibre for their voice and data communications. The good news is fibre connectivity is increasingly available across the UK, and can provide your businesses with faster internet speeds, and a better VoIP business phone system now—not only at some point in the distant future when quantum communications is a reality.

So the take-aways for trivial pursuit? 1) The UK developed fibre optic technology 2) The UK is working on using it for quantum communications 3) Quantum communications is the next big thing 4) Your business can have fibre optic connectivity today. 

About VTSL

VTSL is a London based business phone system provider specialising in hosted communications including fibre optic connectivity. The company was one of the first to market with a VoIP business phone system that guaranteed voice quality in 2006 and has continued to develop its own IP and applications, providing businesses with industry leading telephony solutions.  For more information on VTSL’s business phone systems or fibre connectivity please get in touch at info@vtsl.net.