Cisco Turns Its Attention To The Control Layers Of Its Quantum Network

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Cisco Turns Its Attention To The Control Layers Of Its Quantum Network
Cisco Networks, through its Outshift R&D and incubator unit, has for several years been piecing together the network architecture needed for quantum computing. The company believes that scaling quantum environments will not only mean creating larger systems to handle the massive numbers of qubits that will run applications. Scaling also will require connecting quantum computers through networks to create distributed and cloud-like architectures, similar to their classical computing counterparts.
In short, it is about scaling out rather than simply scaling up.
Early last year, the Outshift group was put in charge of building the quantum networking stack (below) and later in 2025 unveiled the prototype of its quantum network entangling chip, which works by generating entangled pairs of photons over large distances. Such entanglement can’t be done with classical bits of information, and is a key part of what makes quantum systems so much faster and more powerful.
In April, Cisco introduced the working prototype of its Universal Quantum Switch, which is designed to connect quantum sensors and quantum systems not only created by different vendors but also that use different modalities, such as superconducting, photonics, neutral atoms, and trapped ions.
Now Cisco is pulling in the tools needed to scale the quantum network itself. At the Cisco’s Quantum Summit this month, the company announced the Quantum Network Controller, another research prototype that provides the control layer needed replace the manual work being done now with automation that can keep up with machine speed of the any-to-any connections that the Universal Quantum Switch enables.
“Connecting 1,000 quantum nodes point to point takes close to 500,000 dedicated links,” wrote Vijoy Pandey, senior vice president of Outshift.
The problem, according to Ramana Kompella, head of Cisco Research, is that right now, in these relatively early days of quantum development, much of the work is still being done by humans. That won’t last as demand on the networks scale.
“Where we are today, if you look at the quantum networks, they're very point-to-point, manually stitched together and configured,” Kompella tells The Next Platform. “The moment you actually have application scale requests coming in at machine speeds, essentially saying, ‘I want to be able to entangle this node and this node,’ that's the power of a network. Any nodes would want to properly exchange entanglements, so if you have these requests coming in at machine speeds, the human way of configuring and reconfiguring the fabric is not going to scale. That's why you need a control plane that can scale and operate at machine speeds, which is where the controller comes into play.”
Classical systems already use controllers to automate operations and manage resources, expose APIs, and other actions, but they’re deterministic – their execution timing, task scheduling, and other steps are predictable and repeatable. Quantum is a different and more complex animal, says Reza Nejabati, head of quantum research and Quantum Labs at Cisco. It’s probabilistic, with qubits that have short-lived coherence times, with various factors like loss, fidelity, synchronization and the performance of the system determining the success or failure of an operation. Cisco is aiming to shield application developers from quantum’s complexity, Nejabati says.
Cisco’s controller does this by acting as an abstraction layer, providing what Pandey called an Entanglement-as-a-Service model, exposing an API for everything from switches to detectors to timing systems. An application can request entanglement by pointing to the endpoints fidelity, rate, fidelity, and timing it needs, and the controller schedules the connection to address the demand. It goes on to ensure the quality of the link, uses predefined tuning, and if performance falters, retries or reinitializes the job.
The controller also allows quantum systems – and their various modalities – to hook into the network. For Cisco, like IBM and others, the modality of choice is superconducting.
“We would love to think that everything will be built by Cisco, but the reality is we will work with many different components coming in from many different vendors,” Kompella says. “It's also the goal of this to try and hide the complexity associated with onboarding many different types of devices and shield all this complexity to the applications. That's really the missing piece without which you cannot actually scalably operate your quantum networks in the future.”
Another step for Cisco is its Network-Aware Quantum Compiler. Organizations need applications to be able to integrate and talk with the controller (below).
“The first application that we tackle is the distributed quantum computing compiler, which effectively takes a large circuit, breaks it up into smaller pieces, and drives the network with the help of this controller in distributing entanglements at the right time so that your partial computed state is actually moving from processor A to processor B,” Kompella says. “Together, these are the missing pieces.”
Pandey sees the controller and compiler working together. The compiler works out the computation the application needs – how much entanglement the network needs to provide, the nodes involved, and the fidelity needed. From there, the controller puts all of that onto the network.
The quantum networking space is getting a growing amount of attention, with some estimates of the market’s size are in the range of $2 billion and vendors including Nu Quantum, Photonics Inc., Aliro Technologies, and QphoX. There also is Qunnect, which Cisco partnered with earlier this year in a demonstration of quantum scaling entanglement swapping on 17.6 kilometers New York City’s telecom fiber network.
Kompella notes that quantum use cases aren’t the only ones that can benefit from quantum networking. There also are classical computing applications that can be helped now. One example is decision coordination, a high-speed trading application in the financial services industry that can use a tool like Cisco’s Quantum Sync for instant communication between geographically separated nodes.
A quantum eavesdropper detection application uses quantum signals, mixing in quantum-entangled photons with classical photons on the same optical fiber, he says, adding that “if there is an eavesdropper in the middle, they're basically disturbing the entanglements. As a result, you can detect them.”
The development of quantum networks is still in the early phases, but Kompella says that interconnected quantum systems could on the scene in three to five years. However, still much needs to be done. One hurdle that needs to be cleared involves transduction, the conversion of quantum signals and information from one physical domain or frequency to another while preserving superposition, entanglement and other quantum properties. Or as Kompella puts it, “where your computational qubits meet the communication qubits.”
Another is quantum memory, or the storing of data as qubits. The challenge is the fragility of qubits, which can be easily disrupted and lose their quantum properties by light, vibrations, or other noises.
“Quantum memories are actually extremely helpful in increasing your fidelities and timing and coordinating between many different quantum nodes,” he says. “That's an area where quantum memories is still nascent and you probably need to see some more advances in realizing some of these cutting-edge applications.”

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