11 Mar 2027
10:30 - 11:30
Expo Theater II
Quantum communication is leaving the laboratory. National quantum communication infrastructures are under construction in Europe, Asia and North America, and metropolitan QKD links now secure traffic in major cities on three continents. Most of these links still run on dedicated or dark fiber, which is scarce and expensive. If quantum communication is to become a mainstream network capability rather than a boutique overlay, it has to share deployed fiber with existing classical data services.
That means operating a channel of less than one photon per pulse next to classical channels a million to a hundred million times stronger. The obstacles are spontaneous Raman scattering and four-wave mixing, amplifier ASE, loss from ROADMs, splitters and connectors, polarization and phase drift in deployed plant, aerial-span vibration, and maintenance signals such as OTDR injection, which was not designed with quantum channels in mind. A number of results suggest it is workable: DV-QKD coexisting with multi-terabit traffic on backbone, metro and access fiber; CV-QKD past 100 km with fully populated classical channels; entanglement distribution and teleportation in the same fiber as data traffic; multicore fiber with low inter-core crosstalk; and hollow-core fiber with orders-of-magnitude lower Raman scattering efficiency.
The panel asks whether quantum communication is ready for deployment, and on what fiber: dark, lit, or new. Panelists will come from network operators, quantum system vendors, fiber manufacturers, national research institutes, standards bodies or early enterprise adopters.
Questions for the panel
- Wavelength planning and noise management: O-band quantum with C+L-band data, or the reverse? How much classical launch power can a quantum channel tolerate
- Beyond QKD: does coexistence extend to entanglement distribution, teleportation and precise time and frequency transfer, or do their noise and timing requirements call for dedicated fiber?
- Amplifier bypass: what network changes are needed — quantum-transparent nodes, ROADM changes, trusted relays?
- New fiber: do the gains from hollow-core and multicore fiber justify deploying new fiber for quantum services?
- Access: what does coexistence look like in point-to-multipoint networks such as PONs, given passive splitters, reflections from poor connections, aerial fiber and burst-mode upstream scheduling?
