Qunnect Inc. and Cisco together have successfully demonstrated the world’s first high, speed quantum metro, scale, quantum entanglement swapping over the commercial fiber network, which is a major step towards the realization of practical quantum networks that can provide secure communications and distributed quantum computing. The experiment was done on the Qunnect’s GothamQ platform in New York City and covered 17. 6 km of the existing telecom fiber from Brooklyn to Manhattan. The trial combined Qunnect’s room, temperature quantum hardware with Cisco’s unified quantum networking software orchestrator to validate a scalable hub, and, spoke architecture for quantum networking through commercial data centers. Besides, record entanglement swapping rates of more than 1. 7 million pairs locally and 5, 400 pairs per hour over deployed fiber with greater than 99% polarization fidelity were achieved, these figures being nearly 10, 000 times better than the previous benchmarks on similar platforms. Also, this is the first demonstration of polarization entanglement swapping on real, world fiber in one of the most challenging urban environments.
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“Entanglement swapping is a fundamental operation in the quantum internet. Today, we not only broke the record for rate and scalability, we did so in New York City using some of the noisiest, most chaotic fiber on Earth,” said Mehdi Namazi, Co-Founder and Chief Science Officer for Qunnect, noting this achievement brings practical quantum networks closer to scalable deployment. This integrated system’s use of room-temperature endpoints and automated polarization compensation significantly reduces the complexity and cost of scaling quantum networks, while Cisco’s orchestration software coordinates geographically separated nodes autonomously and lays the groundwork for foundational capabilities like field-ready entanglement distribution and swapping that are essential for distributed quantum computing and a future global quantum grid. “This milestone accelerates our quantum networking vision. Our orchestration software enabled field-ready entanglement distribution and swapping foundational capabilities for distributed quantum computing and the global quantum grid,” said Reza Nejabati, Head of Quantum Research at Cisco, highlighting that decoupling nodes from shared lasers facilitates untethered scalability for practical entanglement-based quantum networks.