Qunnect and Cisco demonstrated metro-scale, high-speed quantum entanglement swapping over 17.6 km (10.9 miles) of deployed commercial fiber in New York City, marking what the companies describe as the first such demonstration using a commercial quantum networking system. The trial ran on Qunnect’s GothamQ testbed, linking Brooklyn and Manhattan through a data center at 60 Hudson Street.
The experiment achieved record entanglement swapping rates of more than 1.7 million pairs per hour locally and 5,400 pairs per hour across deployed metro fiber. The system maintained greater than 99% polarization fidelity, addressing a long-standing challenge in real-world fiber networks where polarization drift and environmental noise degrade quantum states. The companies published the results on arXiv and positioned the work as validation of a scalable hub-and-spoke quantum network architecture anchored in commercial data centers.
Qunnect integrated its room-temperature Carina entanglement sources and Automatic Polarization Controllers with Cisco’s quantum networking software stack, which orchestrated entanglement distribution and swapping across geographically separated nodes. The architecture concentrated cryogenic equipment at a central hub while using room-temperature detectors at endpoints, reducing infrastructure complexity and enabling modular expansion without shared master lasers between nodes.
- Metro span: 17.6 km (10.9 miles) of deployed NYC telecom fiber
- Swapping rate (local): 1.7M+ entangled pairs per hour
- Swapping rate (deployed fiber): 5,400 pairs per hour
- Polarization fidelity: >99%
- Architecture: Hub-and-spoke model with independent atomic entanglement sources
- Hardware profile: Room-temperature endpoints; cryogenics centralized at hub
- Software: Cisco orchestration stack coordinating distributed quantum nodes
“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. “This is a milestone the field has been waiting for, and it was proven possible by Cisco and Qunnect.”
🌐 Analysis: The demonstration shifts quantum networking from laboratory-scale validation toward operational metro deployments, aligning with broader industry efforts to run quantum channels over existing fiber plant rather than purpose-built links. Cisco’s involvement highlights how traditional IP networking vendors are extending orchestration and control-plane expertise into quantum domains, potentially integrating classical and quantum traffic management in shared facilities.
Qunnect’s focus on room-temperature hardware and independent entanglement sources addresses two persistent barriers to scale: cryogenic complexity and laser synchronization across nodes. As competitors pursue quantum repeater research and long-haul entanglement distribution, metro-scale hub-and-spoke models anchored in commercial data centers may emerge as the first commercially viable quantum network topology.
🌐 We’re tracking the latest developments in quantum networking. Follow our ongoing coverage at: https://convergedigest.com/category/quantum
