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Comment by spiderfarmer | Hacker News Reader

Interesting. Here in The Netherlands there will be a quantum network connecting Delft, The Hague, Leiden and Amsterdam, but that's largely still a research project and it won't be up and running before 2020. If QuantumXC has commercially available tech then they seem to be ahead by a couple of years.

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That research quantum network has a different purpose. Quantum key distribution (QKD) as mentioned in the article has been commercially available for a number of years now (for example by ID Quantique [1]). These products rely on having a direct connection, i.e. a single fibre line without repeaters or other ‘interruptions’. This limits their range to about 100km (20dB attenuation).

The research network in The Netherlands is more ambitious than that. The researchers’ goal is to build a true quantum internet, with ‘quantum repeaters’ that allow connections over longer distances [2]. These quantum repeaters work on the principe of quantum entanglement generation and purification to achieve quantum teleportation of qubits to allow end to end communication [3].

If you’re interested in learning more about this, I can highly recommend the free edX course by TU Delft and Caltech on quantum cryptography [4].

[1]: https://www.idquantique.com/quantum-safe-security/overview/q... [2]: https://qutech.nl/roadmap/quantum-internet/ [3]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_network#Quantum_repe... [4]: https://www.edx.org/course/quantum-cryptography-0

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