Toshiba Sees Gobal Quantum Internet After Cambridge Breakthrough

(CapacityMedia) Toshiba’s UK laboratory in Cambridge has pushed the distance for secure quantum communications to 600km.
The company, which hails this as a significant advance towards building a global quantum internet, says previous commercial quantum key distribution systems were limited to 100-200km of fibre.
This is a very exciting result,” said Mirko Pittaluga, a Toshiba research scientist in Cambridge. “With the new techniques we have developed, further extensions of the communication distance for QKD are still possible and our solutions can also be applied to other quantum communications protocols and applications.”
Toshiba said the breakthrough will enable long distance quantum-secured information transfer between metropolitan areas and said it is a major advance towards building the future quantum internet.
Toshiba says this is the latest step in one of the most difficult technological challenges in building the quantum internet, the problem of how to transmit quantum bits over long optical fibres.
Taro Shimada, Toshiba’s chief digital officer, said: “Our vision is a platform for quantum information technology services, which will not only enable secure communication on a global scale, but also transformational technologies such as cloud-based quantum computing and distributed quantum sensing.”