Quantum networking company Qunnect partnered with photonics specialist Monarch Quantum to develop more compact and manufacturable versions of its entanglement distribution hardware.

The companies will adapt Qunnect’s Carina platform for environments where size, weight, power consumption, and operational flexibility are critical. Target applications include satellites, defense platforms, edge computing infrastructure, remote facilities, telecommunications networks, and IoT deployments.

Carina was introduced in 2024 and is a turnkey, rack-mounted system that generates and distributes entangled photon pairs over existing fiber-optic infrastructure. The platform combines entangled-photon sources, single-photon detectors, polarization stabilization, entanglement validation, and orchestration.

Qunnect’s existing systems have been deployed on operational fiber networks in New York City and Berlin. The company has demonstrated that its equipment can maintain entanglement outside controlled laboratory environments and operate alongside conventional data traffic.

Qunnect and Cisco earlier this year used Carina hardware and Cisco’s orchestration software to demonstrate entanglement swapping across 17 kilometers of commercial fiber in New York City. The trial achieved a swapping rate of more than 1.7 million entangled photon pairs per hour locally and 5,400 pairs per hour over deployed fiber.

The new partnership addresses a different obstacle to wider deployment: converting working quantum networking systems into smaller products that can be manufactured consistently and installed in a broader range of environments.

Qunnect will contribute its entanglement-based networking technology and experience from field deployments. Monarch will provide photonic system engineering, miniaturization, productization, packaging, and scalable manufacturing expertise.

“Commercial quantum networking will require more than scientific breakthroughs,” Qunnect CEO Noel Goddard explained. “It will require robust systems, deployable form factors, repeatable production, and scalable supply chains.”

Quantum networks distribute entanglement between separate locations, creating correlations between quantum particles that can support applications unavailable to conventional networks. Proposed uses include tamper-evident communications and authentication, precision timing and synchronization, distributed sensing, and linking quantum processors into larger computing systems.

Many of these applications remain under development, but Qunnect is already deploying Carina as infrastructure for testing. The hardware underpins the GothamQ network in New York and Deutsche Telekom’s BearlinQ testbed in Berlin. The company has also supplied systems for research networks, including a Montana State University installation designed to distribute entanglement over fiber spans of up to 100 kilometers.

Monarch develops integrated photonic engines for quantum computing, sensing, and communications. Under the partnership, the companies plan to produce modular variants of Carina for commercial, industrial, defense, space, and critical infrastructure applications.

The companies have not disclosed a development timetable, manufacturing targets, or prospective customers for the new systems.