By Light Reading
Publication Date: 2026-04-23 13:01:00
Cisco took the wraps off a working research prototype for a switch that it claims is the biggest missing piece for building quantum networks and could accelerate the arrival of practical quantum computing using telecom networks.
The Cisco Universal Quantum Switch can interconnect quantum computers from any vendor to create distributed quantum computing networks. It routes and preserves quantum information for all encoding and entanglement modalities, at room temperature and using existing fiber infrastructure.
The company says the technology is the first switch of its kind and is aimed at expanding quantum computing through distributed networks.
It argues that future quantum use cases will need far more qubits (quantum bits) than quantum computers have today. This limitation can be addressed by scaling up and building bigger computers as well as by scaling out through quantum networks, and both are necessary, according to Cisco.
