Earlier this month our CEO, Dr. Ilana Wisby attended Mobile World Congress Barcelona: the largest and most influential event for the connectivity ecosystem and held a keynote exploring the potential of quantum in telecommunications during their session ‘A New Era of Intelligence’. While quantum computing is poised to create a seismic shift in the opportunities and capabilities of many core sectors, it is set to specifically create value in the telecommunications industry. Imagine a future where you can accurately predict your maintenance needs and traffic demands, saving significant time and money through increased reliability and reduced operational costs or where you can detect network intruders in real-time and provide customers with unprecedented data protection. That is the power and the potential of quantum computing.

Quantum and telecommunications

Simply put, quantum computing uses the principles of quantum mechanics to perform certain tasks much faster than classical computers as well as run certain tasks that classical computers can’t do. And, every time we add a quantum bit we double the number of information storage states available creating a 2^n availability. There are two types of high level problems that quantum computers are particularly good at solving: simulation (particularly of nature, where every molecule and integration is inherently quantum mechanical) and large scale data problems (particularly multivariable).

It is predicted that 50 high quality qubits would outperform any of the world’s computers today and the telecoms industry, like many others, is crying out for a way to solve its complex computational problems: such as network optimisation or data analysis.

So, how can we apply this to the telecommunications industry?

The travelling salesman problem and network optimisation

The travelling salesman and routing problems are a common use case for telecommunications due optimising network efficiency, resource allocation, and overall system performance. The concept is simply how to find the shortest possible route that a salesman can visit every city once and return to his starting point. In the context of telecommunications, this problem translates into finding the most efficient routing paths for data packets or signals to move through a network of interconnected nodes, such as routers or switches. This is essential in telecommunications to minimise latency, reduce congestion, and optimise network resources.

QAOA, the quantum approximation optimisation algorithm, is a hybrid quantum/classical algorithm which is designed to tackle combinatorial optimisation problems. It consists of an initialisation to define all possible solutions; a cost function, which specifies the constraints; and a mixer function, which allows the whole space of solutions to be explored and the optimised route identified. By solving these types of problems using quantum, telecommunications companies can design more efficient network architectures, plan optimal routing paths for data transmission, and improve the overall performance and reliability of communication networks.

Research by Ericsson identified several potential use cases in telecom:

• Physical layer processing of the user data plane in the RAN (quantum Fourier transform and quantum linear solver)
• Clustering for automatic anomaly detection in network design optimization project (quantum K-means algorithm)
• Prediction of the quality of user experience for video streaming based on device and network level metrics (quantum support vector machine)
• Database search at the data management layer (Grover’s algorithm)

OQC ERQC

OQC quantum is seamless, accessible, and powerful. By creating seamless quantum we are ensuring we are deployable to the locations a customer needs; reliable so that it consistently performs; scalable to meet a customer’s expanding needs and secure for even the most sensitive of customer data. Our accessible means that we should not expect customers to come to quantum, we should bring quantum to customers. We do this through multiple access options:

• Direct connect – quantum that is available in their secure and established digital infrastructure, the data centre
• Accessible through private and public cloud
• And integrated directly into the software applications that customers use everyday so it builds into existing workflows

Our powerful quantum is built on the simplest possible solution to enable rapid scalability, offers hyper fast runtimes and gate operations, is easily able to deal with high volume workloads and has low error for the highest quality outcome. This is all possible through our core IP, the Coaxmon. The Coaxmon is the world’s simplest quantum architecture. The transmon qubit (quantum bit), the most widely studied, is the most evidence based and most promising superconducting qubit. The Coaxmon combats the traditional scaling challenges of superconducting circuits through its 3D architecture. The flexibility and scalability of the Coaxmon is at the heart of our ability to develop enterprise ready quantum and is the core of seamless, accessible and powerful quantum compute. Through partnerships and collaborations with global leaders, we are offering hybrid solutions to customers, bringing hybrid compute into the data centre to give customers access to an unparalleled level of compute power through the co-location of their GPU with our QPU. This means we are not only accessible in a secure way – to move beyond toy data and toy problem sets – but also working to provide customers with the ability to run hybrid workloads and get started on the quantum journey and transition today. And it’s crucial you start now. Building your capability and understanding of the technology and the market in line with the technology itself means you will be the first to capitalise off it when the technology is offering business value. At OQC we are not far away from this possibility and will work with you to provide that seamless access to the most powerful technology in the world. To start building your quantum capabilities;