AZoQuantum speaks with Noel Goddard, CEO and co-founder of Qunnect, about the company’s recent demonstration of quantum teleportation over operational telecommunications fiber. Conducted on Deutsche Telekom infrastructure in Berlin, the experiment demonstrated that high-fidelity quantum teleportation can operate across existing metro fiber while sharing the network with live classical data traffic.
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In a few words, could you explain what you achieved in quantum teleportation?
Qunnect demonstrated quantum teleportation over Deutsche Telekom's operational fiber infrastructure in Berlin. Using Qunnect's Carina hardware, we teleported a quantum state across 30 kilometers of deployed fiber at 90% average fidelity, running alongside live classical data traffic. The demonstration proved that teleportation can work in the real world, not just the lab, using standard racks and commercial fiber. In this instance, one half of an entangled pair of photons is sent through telecommunications fiber while the other remaining photon interacts with quantum information. That information is then teleported (nature of quantum entanglement) to the entangled photon that was sent into fiber which carries that quantum information to its final destination.
From an operator’s view, which technical breakthroughs or design choices were most critical to achieving 90% teleportation fidelity outside the lab?
Qunnect’s Carina hardware is what made this possible. It was built specifically for deployment in real-world fiber environments using three capabilities.
First, automatic polarization stabilization. Deployed fiber is a noisy environment - temperature changes, vibration, and physical stress continuously affect the signal as photons travel. Carina corrects for those disturbances in real time.
Second, the entanglement source. Carina generates entangled photon pairs designed to work with both telecom fiber and the quantum devices that will connect to future quantum networks.
Third, compatibility with existing infrastructure. By keeping quantum and classical signals spectrally separated, Carina preserved entanglement fidelity even with live commercial data running on the same fiber.
You ran quantum and classical signals together on the same metro fiber. What were the main co-propagation challenges, and how did you mitigate crosstalk and instability?
Co-propagating classical light leaking into the quantum channel adds uncorrelated noise that degrades coincidence rates and ultimately fidelity. In our configuration, co-propagating C-band classical traffic reduced average teleportation fidelity from 90.1% to 85.9%.
The primary mitigation was spectral separation: quantum photons in the O-band at 1324 nm, classical traffic in the C-band at 1561 nm. A Mux/Demux system combined and separated the signals at each end of the fiber loop. We also inserted a 12 nm bandpass filter at the tomography station to suppress residual classical light reaching the single-photon detectors.
The residual performance impact is consistent with the known physics of inter-channel crosstalk, and is addressable with improved filtering in future system iterations. The more important point is that co-propagation worked: quantum teleportation succeeded on a fiber simultaneously carrying live commercial data.
How was Qunnect’s Carina platform integrated into Deutsche Telekom’s existing network?
Carina is rack-mounted, room-temperature hardware that fits into a standard telecom data center. In Berlin, the hardware was deployed directly at T-Labs' Quantum Lab and connected to Deutsche Telekom's existing fiber. Operator control in this context means Deutsche Telekom's team could monitor and run the quantum link as part of their operational network. Carina’s stabilization runs automatically, maintaining signal quality without requiring a physicist on-site.
How will the wavelength choice shape future interfaces between your network and quantum computing or sensing platforms?
Carina’s entanglement source was designed with future quantum devices in mind. It generates photons at a wavelength that is natively compatible with a range of emerging quantum platforms while simultaneously sending a companion photon through standard telecom fiber with low loss. That means Carina can serve as the bridge between quantum devices and the fiber network without requiring additional conversion hardware.
As you move toward deployable quantum teleportation services, which concrete service models are you prioritizing?
Quantum teleportation unlocks several distinct service categories: distributed quantum computing, quantum cryptography, secure cloud-based quantum services including quantum data centers, and networks of highly sensitive quantum sensors. The immediate commercial opportunity is in the infrastructure layer, enabling telecom operators like Deutsche Telekom to offer quantum-secured links and distribute quantum resources to enterprise customers over their existing fiber.
In the upcoming multi-node teleportation tests on the Berlin testbed, what will you focus on?
Entanglement swapping is at the heart of addressing the routing challenges. Qunnect was able to demonstrate this year with Cisco that its entanglement source produces high-quality pairs of entangled photons that can be deployed at nodes throughout a metro-scale network. Independent entanglement sources working with high-purity entangled photons can support an architecture where these sources would be at every node and swapping would be the mechanism to route information across a network.
What types of collaboration between operators, technology providers, and academia are most critical to move from demos to commercial quantum networking services?
The quantum internet and similar quantum breakthroughs can’t happen without quantum networks. We need ecosystems to collaborate, with operators, technology providers, and academia all pulling in the same direction. That's the model Qunnect is already running with Deutsche Telekom on carrier-grade deployment, CERN and Montana State on research and scientific infrastructure, Cisco on enterprise data centers, and in Albuquerque on regional ecosystem development. The demo-to-service gap closes when all three are at the table.
About the Speaker
Noel is the CEO of Qunnect, a company pioneering hardware to transform the existing telecom infrastructure into quantum networks for distributed entanglement applications. Prior to this role, she was an investor with the Accelerate NY Seed Fund, where she built a successful portfolio of deep technology and life science companies in Downstate NY. Noel is a serial entrepreneur, having founded/led two biotech startup companies. Before joining the startup community, Noel was a professor of physics at Hunter College, CUNY and a Junior Fellow of Harvard University.
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