- Quantum technology adoption in telecom is accelerating as operators explore real‑world use cases
- Comcast is testing quantum algorithms that create backup paths to reroute network traffic
- Deutsche Telekom partnered with Qunnect on a quantum teleportation trial conducted over an existing fiber network
Quantum technology is already alive and well in telecom networks, and although security is the top-of-mind use case, telcos are also looking at quantum to make networks more resilient and transmit information more quickly.
Comcast announced this week it completed a trial with AMD and Classiq that leveraged quantum software to find independent backup paths for network sites. If one site is taken offline for routine maintenance and another has an unexpected outage, the idea is that quantum algorithms could reroute traffic without disruption.
The operator is already using AI to identify network issues and automate software changes, but AI is limited in the scenarios it can run, said Comcast Chief Network Officer Elad Nafshi. With quantum technology, “we’re able to run through [an] infinite number of scenarios and be able to do all that simultaneously.”
“Think about the network as kind of like a maze,” he told Fierce. “AI would be tracking until you get to the dead end, and you pack back and you go to the next one and eventually you’re going to find your way out, right?”
“Quantum calculates the entire maze, boom, in one shot,” Nafshi said.
For the trial, AMD's Instinct GPUs supported quantum techniques that ran alongside classical computing, reaching “meaningful computational capacity not yet possible through quantum hardware alone,” according to a press release.
Classiq meanwhile supplied quantum software and engineering support for modeling, implementing and executing the trial in both hardware and simulated environments.
Nafshi noted while quantum hardware is continuously advancing, there are only so many quantum bits, or qubits, it can run.
“With the size of our network, how do you continue to validate the algorithmic solution…while we wait for the algorithmic capabilities to catch up?” he said.
By using AMD GPUs, Comcast isn’t just sitting still and waiting for full quantum hardware to materialize, Nafshi explained. “We’re still able to make significant progress in our innovation and how we look at network reliability.”
DT, Qunnect advance quantum teleportation
Elsewhere, Deutsche Telekom and Qunnect successfully demonstrated quantum teleportation over an existing fiber network in Berlin.
Quantum teleportation sounds like something out of science fiction, but the process involves transmitting a particle’s state from one location to another without moving the particle itself.
What DT and Qunnect did was “actually teleport information across their network in the presence of regular digital data traffic,” Qunnect CEO Noel Goddard told Fierce. “So, it’s a really great stepping stone towards what these networks were always intended to do.”
The trial leveraged Qunnect’s quantum entanglement distribution hardware to teleport a qubit over a 30-kilometer distance. Entanglement is when two or more particles become intrinsically linked, regardless of the distance between them. Whatever happens to one particle determines the state of the other.
The task was no easy feat, Goddard explained, “because entanglement is very fragile.”
“You need to make sure that it gets from its origin to its destination with very high fidelity,” she explained, meaning that the state of the qubit is preserved. “If there’s corruption in the entanglement, then it can’t perform the protocol either.”
DT and Qunnect said they achieve teleportation fidelities of up to 95%, with the operator demonstrating “they could switch between different paths within their network and each time stabilizing the path that they were using in order to preserve that type of fidelity,” said Goddard.
The teleportation was performed at 795 nanometers, a wavelength that could potentially integrate telecom infrastructure with applications such as neutral-atom quantum computers, atomic clocks and quantum sensors.
Goddard further noted the trial used automatic polarization compensation, a technology that stabilizes quantum information when it encounters disruption across aerial and buried fiber.
Think of it like “noise-cancelling headphones,” she said. “They sample the environment then they create a correction signal and then you get the noise cancelling effect.”
It’s a particularly useful tool for transmitting qubits over aerial fiber, which can be “exceptionally noisy because they’re subject to temperature changes, wind, weather, trains, vibrations from rush hour,” etc.
Separately, Cisco and Qunnect announced this week they conducted a quantum entanglement trial across Qunnect’s network testbed in New York.
Qunnect last year secured $10 million in new funding from Cisco and other investors to advance real-world quantum applications.
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