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.