Cisco Orchestrates Qunnect's Quantum Network Trial

The trial built on Cisco’s long-standing investment in Qunnect

Cisco inserted itself into a quantum networking trial with Qunnect that integrated the former’s enterprise-grade orchestration software operating across Qunnect’s deployed telecom fiber running under New York City.

The trial combined Qunnect’s “room-temperature quantum hardware” with Cisco’s unified quantum networking software stack that provided automated control and synchronization across multiple network nodes.

Specifically, the system integrated Qunnect’s atom-based entanglement source with Cisco’s unified quantum networking software stack. That entanglement source was from Qunnect’s Carina platform that generated entangled photon pairs at a specific size for telecom fiber transmission and at a different size for compatibility with quantum devices. It also used automatic polarization controllers to continuously compensate for “drift in deployed fiber,” and end nodes using room-temperature detectors and cryogenic equipment at the central hub.

The test was conducted across Qunnect’s GothamQ fiber test bed that runs 17.6 kilometers underneath parts of Brooklyn and Manhattan. Touted trial results included the “polarization entanglement swapping over deployed telecom fiber,” the “teleportation of true single photons across an urban network,” a robust “99% polarization entanglement fidelity across all three nodes” used in the trial,” and “swapping rates” of “nearly four orders of magnitude beyond prior independent-source benchmarks.”

Qunnect CEO Noel Goddard explained to SDxCentral that the trial’s independent atomic source construct supported a “hub-and-spoke” architecture that can better scale in a deployment environment.

“What was exciting about this to us is that we have two independent entanglement sources talking to a hub in the center, which is a data center, two spokes talking to a hub in the center, and the hub does the transaction and sends the data back to the spokes,” Goddard explained. “The spokes have all room temperature equipment, and those spokes could be, in the future, quantum computers. They could be quantum sensors. They could be anything else that you want to transact with, their transacting and sharing entanglement because of a centralized transaction at the hub, and the same protocol can be used within the data center itself. So if you had multiple computers within the data center, quantum computers, you wanted to share entanglement over them, the transaction you would use is identical. It is entanglement swapping, which wouldn't basically entangle two computers with each other.”

Ramana Kompella, VP and head of Cisco Research VP, added that the trial was a step for the vendor toward those quantum data center and network goals.

“What we are really building is the foundations for how many quantum processors can actually come together, or quantum nodes can come together and participate in quantum communication,” Kompella said. “So for us, that includes foundational elements, like entanglement sources, Bell state measurement devices … and the fabric needs to configure and reconfigure multiple times depending on how the traffic demands are. That's the thought process that has gone into devising this kind of a quantum orchestration software.”

Cisco’s quantum interest and the next challenge
The trial built on Cisco’s long-standing investment in Qunnect, which included participation by Cisco Investments in a $10M Qunnect Series A round in mid-2025.

That investment was put toward Qunnect’s focus on a technical platform that did not require extreme cooling or a vacuum and would allow for this quantum networking approach to be installed into an already established networking deployment.

Qunnect’s initial work showed the ability to create entanglement, distribute it, preserve it, and validate it in support of entanglement-based protocols run over standard telecom fiber.

That work then led to a test early last year with German telecom giant Deutsche Telekom in Berlin. That test transmitted entangled photons over a 30-kilometer-long fiber-optic network that able to automatically compensate to changing network conditions while maintaining 99 percent fidelity over a 17-day test period.

The latest Cisco work extends those efforts.

“This is basically demonstrating something, which most people can only show in a laboratory, but it's something which is literally Cisco software orchestrating Qunnect hardware to perform the basic protocols which are necessary in order to support both quantum data centers and quantum networks in the future,” Goddard said of the latest Cisco work.

Kompella added that the trial showed that the model was “90% there in terms of all operational elements a network brings to the table, and combined with the fact that this is real noisy environment, for which we are testing this out, it's actually a pretty good proof point, but that we can actually build quantum networks of the future using the technologies that are that are basically currently available in the market.”

It’s that last 10% that now remains a hurdle, with quantum compute hardware and interconnect noted as being the current areas of developmental focus.

Kompella pointed to Cisco’s work with IBM that was announced last year, which calls for the duo to develop hardware for networked quantum computers, but added that this work is just part of being able to support different quantum computing modalities. Kompella pointed to some like photonic, cold atoms, neutral atoms, charged ions, and superconducting.

“Our goal is to actually understand how to interconnect, not just within one modality, but across modalities, because we are really building a network for all types of modalities. We are not actually wedded to any particular technology,” Kompella said. “That is actually the next challenge, which is around how do we integrate our network with real quantum computers and can show that value in entangling computational qubits from one quantum processor to another quantum processor.”