  We present and analyze a gated single photon avalanche detector using a sine
gating scheme with a simple but effective low-pass filtering technique for fast
low-noise single photon detection at telecom wavelength. The detector is
characterized by 130 ps short gates applied with a frequency of 1.25 GHz,
yields only 70 ps timing jitter and noise probabilities as low as 7E-7 per gate
at 10% detection efficiency. We show that the detector is suitable for high
rate quantum key distribution (QKD) and even at room temperature it could allow
for QKD over distances larger than 25 km.
