  We present an in-depth analysis regarding the error resistance and
optimization of our all-optical Bell measurement and ultrafast long-distance
quantum communication scheme proposed in [arXiv:1503.06777]. In order to
promote our previous proposal from loss- to fault-tolerance, we introduce a
general and compact formalism that can also be applied to other related schemes
(including non-all-optical ones such as [PRL 112, 250501]). With the help of
this new representation we show that our communication protocol does not only
counteract the inevitable photon loss during channel transmission, but is also
able to resist common experimental errors such as Pauli-type errors (bit- and
phase-flips) and detector inefficiencies (losses and dark counts). Furthermore,
we demonstrate that on the physical level of photonic qubits the choice of the
standard linear optical Bell measurement with its limited efficiency is optimal
for our setting in the sense that, apart from their potential use in state
preparation, more advanced Bell measurements yield only a small decrease in
resource consumption. We devise two state generation schemes that provide the
required ancillary encoded Bell states (quasi-)on-demand at every station. The
schemes are either based on nonlinear optics or on linear optics with
multiplexing and exhibit resource costs that scale linearly or less than
quadratic with the number of photons per encoded qubit, respectively. Finally,
we show that it is possible to operate our communication scheme with on-off
detectors instead of employing photon-number-resolving detectors.
