U.K. telecom provider BT and Toshiba announced what they claimed is the first trial of a commercial quantum-secured metro network, in London, the first customer on that network being multinational professional services firm EY.
The network uses quantum key distribution (QKD) technology, designed to protect fiber network links from the threat of cybersecurity attacks, particularly those employing quantum computers. EY, the first announced commercial customer to use QKD to secure live data transmission between its own sites, is using the network to connect two offices in London, one in the Canary Wharf area and the other in London Bridge. Its involvement is a major sign that quantum-secure communications for corporate customers are getting much closer to reality.
BT, Toshiba and EY assembled at the BT Tower in London to announce the network’s launch, with officials saying it represents a critical step in the U.K. government's strategy to become a quantum-enabled economy.
"Quantum technology creates new and significant opportunities for business, but presents potential risks,” said Praveen Shankar, EY U.K. & Ireland Managing Partner for Technology, Media and Telecoms. “Quantum-secure data transmission represents the next major leap forward in protecting data, an essential component of doing business in a digital economy. Our work with two of the world's leading technology innovators will allow us to demonstrate the power of quantum to both EY and our clients."
BT and Toshiba first unveiled plans to create the QKD metro network last fall. BT will operate the network, providing a range of quantum-secured services including dedicated high bandwidth end-to-end encrypted links, delivered over the private fiber networks of its Openreach subsidiary. Toshiba is providing the QKD hardware and key management software. The technical collaboration for this network was conducted in BT's Adastral Park labs in Suffolk, U.K., and the Quantum technology Business Division of Toshiba, based in Tokyo, Japan and Cambridge, U.K., the companies said.
Andrew Lord, senior manager of Optical Networks and Quantum Research at BT Global Services, told Fierce Electronics last month prior to the commercial launch that the network under construction was going to be important in terms of getting QKD out of the lab and “grappling with how to do QKD in a network mode.”
He added that BT is turning QKD into “a network capability. Networks are built as they are for a reason. They save costs, they aggregate capacities together and put them on shared infrastructure, and quantum has to be able to do the same thing for it to be a cost-effective tool.”
Lord continued, “It's being fully integrated into our regular BT exchanges, our BT software management systems, our BT alarm systems, our data communications network, so that it becomes like business as usual.”
He said that a commercial trial with a real customer can help BT learn much more about the use cases for QKD, including how BT might use it for its own ends and how it might support it as a service offering going forward.
“Part of the trial is to first with them [the customer, unnamed at the time of the interview] figure out exactly what those use cases look like,” Lord said. “For example, maybe they just want the keys to do their own stuff and will just pay for those, or maybe they want a fully managed service which is fully encrypted. Maybe they'll buy Ethernet service with key encryption and decryption, or maybe they want IP layer encryption. Maybe they want encryption into a data center. So there's a whole range of different kinds of use cases depending on the customer, which is what we want to explore in the next two or three years on this metro network.”
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