Webinar recording: Quantum networks and the future of UK connectivity

Quantum computing has a scaling problem, and the fix may lie not in bigger machines but in the networks that connect them. That was the throughline of techUK’s recent webinar, Quantum Networks and the Future of UK Connectivity, which brought together three of the sector’s leading companies to explore how quantum networking could reshape the UK’s connectivity landscape.  

Part of techUK’s Secure and Resilient Connectivity and Quantum Readiness series, the session took its cue from the government’s National Quantum Strategy, whose Mission 2 places quantum networking front and centre. The speakers moved from first principles to the potential of quantum networking and a candid panel discussion. You can watch the full recording below. 

The scaling problem 

Every speaker returned to the same point: a genuinely useful quantum computer needs millions of physical qubits, while today’s machines top out in the hundreds.  

Crucially, quantum computers are not simply faster classical ones. They excel only at specific problems in areas such as chemistry, materials and optimisation, meaning quantum computing and classical computing will sit alongside one another in the future. 

Building ever-larger single processors “monolithic” scaling runs into hard limits of cooling, control and cost. The alternative is to connect many smaller quantum computers into one system, much as classical data centres are woven together by networks. That relies on entanglement, a uniquely quantum property that links qubits across distance. Get the networking right, the panellists argued, and the arrival of practical quantum computing could be accelerated. 

Three approaches 

Companies such as Cisco are developing a full-stack strategy spanning hardware, protocols and software, including a room-temperature entanglement source generating 200 million photon pairs per second and a universal quantum switch that translates between different qubit “modalities” so processors built on rival technologies can be linked.  

Cambridge-based Nu Quantum focused on the interfaces and networking units that entangle separate processors, alongside recent work on distributed quantum error correction that lets a modular system keep computing even when a machine fails or is taken offline for maintenance.  

Canada’s Photonic is pushing for silicon-based “T-Centre”, a qubit that acts as memory, processor and network node at once. Photonic has already entangled over 30 km of live Telus fibre around Vancouver, a first step towards a quantum network spanning a whole city. 

Collaboration, supply chains and the road ahead 

With two of the three speakers based overseas, international partnership emerged as essential. The key takeaway is that no single country can build quantum alone, and UK–Canada bilateral projects were held up as a model of what works.  

Manufacturing and supply chains were flagged as the nearest-term bottleneck the specialised components quantum networks depend on take years to mature, so resilient supply chains have to be built now rather than once demand arrives. On the inevitable question of quantum and AI, the speakers urged caution, seeing genuine promise in narrow areas such as error correction while warning against sweeping claims that the two technologies are automatically multiplicative.  

In final comments it became clear that today’s quantum computers are comparable to the room-sized machines of the early classical era powerful, but too young to reveal the range of potential applications. Networking is no longer a footnote to quantum computing but the bridge to large, fault-tolerant systems and, increasingly, the industry’s public roadmaps agree.