DT and Qunnect Test Quantum Teleportation Over Live Network

While teleporting people remains science fiction, teleporting quantum information is now a practical reality. T-Labs and Qunnect successfully demonstrated quantum teleportation over a commercial network in Berlin, marking a major milestone in advancing deployable quantum technologies on existing telecommunications infrastructure.

By using newly commercialized technologies to overcome instabilities and interferences in existing telecom infrastructure, T-Labs and Qunnect demonstrated how a telecommunications operator can integrate quantum teleportation capabilities into operational networks. During trials conducted in a real-world telecom environment in January, the team achieved quantum teleportation over 30 km of commercial fiber cables.

The experiment was performed using Qunnect’s commercially available quantum entanglement distribution hardware and DT’s Berlin quantum infrastructure, representing the first practical test of core components required for a future teleportation service. Quantum teleportation is a key building block for the future quantum internet, enabling the transfer of quantum information between distant locations. It does this by recreating an identical quantum state of a particle at the destination using pre-shared quantum entanglement rather than transmitting a physical particle.

The trial teleported qubits generated by a weak coherent source over a 30-km fiber loop connecting T-Lab’s Quantum Lab to a node on the Berlin fiber testbed. Qunnect’s Carina platform integrates an entanglement generator that produces pairs of quantum-entangled photons for distribution over telecom fiber, along with a polarization compensation component that counteracts environmentally induced noise in both buried and aerial fiber, enabling high-rate, high-fidelity transport of quantum bits between network nodes. As a result, the teams achieved teleportation fidelities at an average of 90%, according to the preliminary publication of the data. At its peak, an accuracy of 95 percent was achieved.