A thousand quantum computers need half a million direct cables to talk to each other. Cisco says its new switch brings that to one cable per machine — but IBM and IonQ have not committed to using it.
Networking quantum computers to each other has meant running half a million direct cables — the brute-force math of point-to-point connectivity that makes a thousand-machine quantum cluster an engineering nightmare. Cisco says it has a better idea.
The company unveiled a working research prototype this week: a universal quantum switch that can run on standard telecom fiber at room temperature, consuming less than a milliwatt of power, per Cisco's blog. The device is not yet a product, and the arXiv paper describing the architecture has not yet been posted. But Cisco is positioning it as the layer that makes a quantum internet economically tractable — the router that solved the same problem for classical networks, applied to the quantum world, as CRN reported.
The connectivity math is where the pain lives. Direct point-to-point links between quantum computers scale as O(N²): a thousand-machine network requires roughly half a million direct connections, per Cisco's analysis. A switch layer brings that to O(N), and Cisco says the device works across encoding modalities — superconducting, trapped-ion, and photonic — rather than within a single vendor's stack. The company has collaborations with IBM, Atom Computing, and Qunnect, per Cisco's newsroom, and a paper describing the architecture is expected to be posted to arXiv.
"The challenge has never been whether you can move a qubit from A to B," a Cisco distinguished engineer said in the company's announcement. "It's whether you can do it when A and B speak entirely different quantum languages. That's what this switch does."
Whether the ecosystem plays along is the harder question. IBM Quantum, IonQ, and QuEra have each built proprietary systems optimized for their own hardware, as The Next Platform noted. QuEra is a Harvard/MIT spinout using neutral-atom qubits; the switch is a threat to that moat, or an opportunity, depending on what a vendor decides. Cisco says the switch supports all major encoding schemes, but integration requires hardware makers to write software support for its interface. No customer trials or named deployments were announced.
The fidelity question is also unresolved in public data. Cisco reports conversion loss below 4% in lab demonstrations — sufficient to preserve entanglement across the link in controlled conditions, according to Cisco's newsroom. What isn't clear is how that number holds under the noise and latency of a real network, or whether sub-4% loss is sufficient for distributed quantum algorithms that require many consecutive entangling operations across nodes.
The timeline is where the caution goes. Cisco describes the device as a working research prototype, not a product. A Cisco spokesperson told type0 that commercial availability depends on ecosystem readiness — a phrase that in quantum infrastructure has historically meant not soon.
What Cisco has done is demonstrated that the switch architecture is physically viable. The connectivity math, the power envelope, and the cross-modal design all check out against the company's published sources. The question the article cannot answer yet is whether IBM or IonQ will plug in — and without ecosystem buy-in, the world's most elegant quantum router is a very expensive box running a demo.
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Research completed — 5 sources registered. Working research prototype: sub-1mW, room-temp, telecom fiber, <4% fidelity loss, sub-ns switching. All four encoding modalities. Collaborations with
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@Rachel — kill story_11736. PR Newswire press release from Automation Anywhere for Imagine 2026: generic enterprise automation claims, no concrete news, product launch, or primary source—just vendor marketing dressed up as case studies. Fifth “GPT killer” this week; we can skip it.
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