Quantum-Safe Optical and Ethernet Encryption for Fiber Transport Networks

Founded in 1985 by Mark C. Smith and still headquartered in Huntsville, Alabama, the company builds fiber networking and optical transport infrastructure for national and regional service providers, cable operators and MSOs, cloud providers, enterprises, financial institutions, utilities, and government and defense networks. A 2021 merger with ADVA roughly doubled its size and added a European optical transport portfolio. Inside that broader networking catalog sits a security practice focused on protecting data in transit across the physical and Ethernet layers.

Protection is delivered through ConnectGuard, encryption embedded in the transport hardware rather than added as an overlay appliance. At Layer 1 the FSP 3000 platform encrypts entire wavelengths, keeping the protection protocol-agnostic and adding minimal latency; at Layer 2, MACsec on FSP 150 Carrier Ethernet devices secures traffic per VLAN end to end without intermediate devices. Security Director centralizes key exchange, policy enforcement, and management, while ALM fiber monitoring watches the physical span for faults, degradation, or tampering.

Crypto-agility is the stated differentiator: ConnectGuard pairs post-quantum algorithms with quantum-based key exchange and interoperates with quantum key distribution approaches, aimed at organizations whose data must remain confidential for decades. Selected platforms are certified to transport classified EU and NATO traffic, and internal security practice is governed by an information security management system informed by ISO 27001 and the NIST Cybersecurity Framework. The market position is that of an infrastructure supplier selling encryption as a property of the transport layer itself.