Japanese telecom giant NTT DoCoMo deployed a second D-Wave quantum computing application in production that slashed network signal load and improved operational efficiency.

The D-Wave application reduced location registration signals generated when devices cross geographic tracking area list (TA-lists) boundaries by more than 65% at the daily peak and reduced paging signals by 7%. This showed a reduction in signal load and improved network operational efficiency.

The “representative problem” spanned 333 base stations, three TA-lists, and nine tracking areas, and was tasked with optimizing TA-Lists’ group geographic areas within a mobile network. The application was able to balance location registration and paging signals that typically move in opposite direction in approximately five minutes.

“The application balances two competing network requirements, significantly reducing location registration signaling while also lowering paging signals,” Hiroshi Kawakami, senior manager for NTT DoCoMo’s Data Platform Department, noted in a statement.

NTT DoCoMo’s initial D-Wave deployment was initiated in mid-2024 and used the vendor’s hybrid-quantum technology to optimize base station tracking areas. The application slashed completion of a test from the 27 hours that it took a “general-purpose solver” to accomplish down to 40 seconds.

It was also able to reduce paging signals by 15%, which allowed 1.2-times more devices to be connected during periods of high call volume, and increased capacity on the network.

“Together with our first production application, it demonstrates how quantum computing can help us address multiple aspects of network optimization and use our infrastructure more efficiently,” Kawakami added.

Quantum carrier momentum

D-Wave’s NTT DoCoMo work follows recent early efforts with AT&T to apply quantum computing to complex network optimization challenges. AT&T used D-Wave’s annealing quantum technology to reduce the processing time for a network optimization workload from about one hour to less than 15 seconds.

AT&T said the proof-of-concept focused on technician routing, with the annealing system producing a higher-quality routing plan than its classical optimization approach while also reducing processing time.

"In our early proof-of-concept applications with D-Wave, quantum optimization reduced the time and increased the quality of our technician routing plans," Lucus Haugen, director of data science for AT&T's Chief Data Office, noted. "The annealing solution provided a better tech routing plan than we achieved with classical optimization and at much faster speeds."

According to D-Wave, AT&T plans to apply the technology to additional optimization challenges across its network operations, such as outage detection and response, technician routing, network build planning, and traffic management.

AT&T's initial focus is on integrating D-Wave's annealing quantum computing technology into the tools already powering its agentic AI solutions. AT&T said its agentic AI tools reduced customer downtime by 12 million hours in 2025 through improvements to network operations, including outage detection and management.

“The takeaway here is that the one successful production deployment led NTT DoCoMo to identify and implement another application,” D-Wave CEO Alan Baratz told investors during the company’s recent earnings call. “And that is how individual use cases begin to develop into broader enterprise adoption.”