'Quantum networking has many practical and commercial use cases in the classical world today,' said Ramana Kompella, head of Cisco Research and Cisco Fellow, in a session at Cisco Live 2026. Particle entanglement, superposition and teleportation are key concepts in quantum physics. Einstein famously dismissed such phenomena as “spooky action at a distance.” Quantum computing is the nascent field of technology bringing that spookiness to life, but it is quantum networking that will actually enable quantum computing to be useful by connecting multiple systems together. According to Cisco, quantum networking’s practical utility isn’t limited to quantum computing, and it can have a material impact on the regular networks we use today. In a deep-dive session at Cisco Live, Ramana Kompella, head of Cisco Research and Cisco Fellow, detailed precisely what quantum networking is, how it works at a theoretical level, and what Cisco is building to enable real world applications. During his session, Kompella made the case that the bottleneck to practical quantum computing is not the processor. It is the network connecting processors together. His argument drew directly from the history of classical infrastructure: The same scale-out methodology that built the modern internet could, he said, accelerate the arrival of useful quantum computing by decades. “Quantum networking can accelerate the arrival of practical quantum computing by decades by using the scale-out methodology that we’ve used successfully in our classical infrastructure,” Kompella said. How quantum networking actually works The starting point is understanding why quantum networks cannot be built like classical ones. “Quantum networking is completely different from classical networking,” Kompella said. In a classical network, data moves as packets through switches and routers. In a quantum network, information is not transported directly. Instead, the network distributes entangled photon pairs between nodes. Entanglement links two photons so that measuring the