Qunnect's two node testbed in Albuquerque runs on standard commercial fiber with room temperature hardware, the first US entanglement network open to outside companies and researchers.
Two anchor nodes on commercial telecom fiber in Albuquerque are now open to outside companies and researchers, marking the first entanglement-based quantum network testbed in the United States that any qualified team can book time on.
The network, called ABQ-Net, was activated on February 24, 2026, by Qunnect, the quantum networking company that built the underlying hardware. Its physical layer runs on Carina, Qunnect's room-temperature entanglement distribution system, which generates pairs of polarization-entangled photons and feeds them directly into ordinary commercial fiber routes that also carry regular internet traffic. The same Carina suite handles dynamic fiber-phase stabilization, the continuous adjustment needed to keep the photons' quantum state intact as the fiber's polarization drifts with temperature and vibration.
That combination is the core of what is new. Most quantum networking experiments to date have required cryogenically cooled equipment and dedicated dark fiber, which has put distributed entanglement research out of reach for all but the best-funded labs and government programs. By packaging photon generation and fiber-phase stabilization as a turnkey, room-temperature platform, Qunnect is offering the kind of operational simplicity that a small company or research group can use without dedicated quantum-optics staff.
"Open-access entanglement testbed" is the category to keep in mind. It means a shared experimental network that external researchers and companies can book time on and run their own experiments, not just observe. The launch, as reported by Quantum Computing Report and confirmed in Qunnect's own press release, frames ABQ-Net as that kind of facility for two anchor nodes integrated into commercial fiber in the Albuquerque area, with stated applications in quantum cybersecurity, distributed quantum processing, and quantum sensing, and named target sectors of defense, finance, telecom, and energy.
Entanglement, the property the network is built around, is the linkage of two particles such that measuring one fixes the state of the other. Distributing that linkage over distance is the technical problem a real entanglement network has to solve, and the reason fiber-phase stabilization matters: real commercial fiber is noisy, and the entanglement signal has to be actively preserved.
"America's first open-access, entanglement-based quantum network" is Qunnect's own language, from the company's February 24, 2026 press release, attributed here as Qunnect's positioning. The press release was distributed via Varnum Street Strategies PR and reached the public through industry coverage in Quantum Computing Report rather than as a standalone wire release.
The first two anchor nodes connect Qunnect's downtown Albuquerque facility with the Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies (CINT), a U.S. Department of Energy-funded facility operated jointly by Sandia National Laboratories and Los Alamos National Laboratory. The network is positioned for future expansion to Air Force Research Lab, University of New Mexico, and Central New Mexico Community College.
Boston-based quantum network software developer Aliro Quantum is among the inaugural commercial users, deploying and validating its quantum security services on the live infrastructure in tandem with Qunnect's Carina hardware. ABQ-Net is backed by Roadrunner Venture Studios and the New Mexico Economic Development Department, and represents a core component of New Mexico's broader $300 million state-level funding commitment aimed at establishing a localized quantum commercialization economy.
Two limits worth flagging. First, "first open-access" is Qunnect-supplied framing from the company's press release, which reached the public through a curated industry outlet; a full technical spec sheet for Carina would let a reader verify the claim against other US entanglement testbeds, including any at national labs that may already accept outside users. Second, the current footprint is two nodes, which is enough for proof-of-concept entanglement distribution but well short of the multi-node topologies that distributed quantum processing will eventually need. The novelty of the launch is in the access model and the room-temperature commercial-fiber stack, not yet in network scale.
What to watch next: whether the anchor-node count grows past two in the next phase, and whether Qunnect publishes a public booking model or technical spec sheet that lets outside users actually sign up. Both moves would convert "first open-access" from framing into something a smart reader can independently verify.