Cisco unveils universal switch for the quantum networking era Networking technology giant Cisco Systems Inc. today introduced a new networking switch for quantum systems that routes quantum information between computers while preserving quantum state. The Cisco Universal Quantum Switch, a working prototype, is the company’s latest proof of concept aimed at pushing quantum systems closer to real-world practical use. Researchers and enterprises already use quantum computers as complementary co-processors to solve specific, mathematically complex problems that are effectively out of reach for classical supercomputers. This is either because they cannot solve them at all or because doing so would take too long to be useful. Enterprises are most interested in optimization, molecular simulation for materials science and drug discovery, and quantum-safe cryptography, while researchers are focused more on physics, simulation and new quantum algorithms. One of the biggest problems facing quantum computing is scale. To reach powerful enough quantum computers, the industry needs to hit millions of qubits, the fundamental unit of quantum information. Current quantum computers are in the hundreds to low thousands of qubits, and roadmaps point toward the low tens of thousands in the next few years, but practical real-world gains will require systems far beyond that. There are two broad ways to reach the practical quantum era: build bigger, more powerful quantum computers, or connect multiple quantum computers together the way classical computers are connected in data centers to behave like a single unified system. Cisco’s innovation does the latter. Making quantum networking universal It also adds several critical features that make it possible to interconnect systems from multiple vendors without specialized hardware. The switch operates at room temperature and over telecom fiber, and includes a Cisco-patented conversion system that translates between different encoding modalities used by different quantum technologies at input and output. That means