Applications should be able to state what they need from a quantum network and receive it. Operators should not have to deliver that service device by device, link by link, command by command.

Give me entanglement between these endpoints across a scale-out fabric, at this fidelity, at this rate, when I need it and for as long as I need it. 

The network should figure out the rest, retrying automatically until the entanglement succeeds, holding the tight timing that quantum operations demand, never reading the quantum information it carries, and doing all of it across many applications and tenants, whether the workload is computing, security, or sensing.

Right now, running a quantum network is like driving a car with a hand on every part: one on the steering, two on each axle, a few on the fuel line, and someone keeping the engine cool. You don’t want to individually turn each wheel, tune the engine, change each gear, and calibrate the steering every time you need to go somewhere. At some point, the mechanics have to disappear behind an interface so you can simply drive, and quantum networking has finally reached that point.

Today, Cisco is introducing two research prototypes that raise quantum networking from the device layer to the network layer: Cisco’s Quantum Network Controller, the control plane for quantum networks, and its first native application, an updated release of Cisco’s Network-Aware Quantum Compiler.

Why does a quantum network need a control plane? 

The qubits we need still far exceed what any single quantum processor holds, and that gap won’t close by adding qubits alone. Scale has to come from connecting machines as well as growing them. That’s the network Cisco is architecting: scalable, interoperable, secure and built for real-world fiber.

Until now, quantum networks have been built point to point, one link at a time, which kept them to a handful of nodes. At that size, running them with hand-built software was painful but workable.

Earlier this year, Cisco introduced the Universal Quantum Switch, a research prototype that opened the path to scalable, shared, any-to-any quantum connectivity across multiple modalities.

Connecting 1,000 quantum nodes point to point takes close to 500,000 dedicated links. The switch is designed to let every node reach every other node over one shared fabric instead. Once that fabric scales, deciding who gets entanglement, at what quality, in what order, with what guarantees and on what timing isn’t a human-scale task. It takes software coordinating every device with the timing precision quantum operations demand. The Controller is that coordinator.

What does Cisco’s Quantum Network Controller actually do? 

The Controller exposes an interface for each device category – sources, switches, detectors, and timing systems – with a hardware abstraction layer (HAL) underneath, so any vendor’s hardware in that category plugs in the same way.

An application requests entanglement, naming the endpoints, rate, fidelity, and timing it needs, without knowing how any of that gets physically produced. We call the model Entanglement-as-a-Service (EaaS). It does for entanglement what shared cloud infrastructure did for CPU cycles, turning a resource that used to require a dedicated physical connection into something the network schedules on demand.

Because the information in a quantum state cannot be read without destroying it, the Controller cannot inspect traffic the way a classical monitoring tool would. Instead, it verifies link quality statistically, applies predefined tuning, retry, or reinitialization when performance drifts, and escalates to a person only when self-correction fails. The Controller does not hand out entanglement once and walk away; it keeps checking that the link stays healthy for as long as the application is using it, and reclaims the hardware the moment the job ends.

In February 2026, Cisco software coordinated multi-node entanglement distribution and swapping with partner hardware across 17.6 kilometers (about 11 miles) of deployed commercial telecom fiber in New York City, achieving greater than 99% polarization fidelity at room temperature. The deployment showed that Cisco software can coordinate quantum hardware from multiple vendors on live, deployed fiber.

What is Cisco’s Network-Aware Quantum Compiler, and how does it relate to the Controller? 

The Compiler decides how a quantum program splits across processors and translates the decision into a network request. It gets no special access: a general-purpose interface treats every application the same way, including a third-party compiler.

The Compiler and the Controller divide the work by design. The Compiler plans the computation, working out how much entanglement the network must deliver, between which nodes and at what fidelity. The Controller delivers it on the hardware.

Computing is one of several uses. Security and coordination applications such as Quantum Alert and Quantum Sync are designed to request entanglement the same way today, with sensing to follow. Underneath, the HAL is the interface between the Controller and hardware from different vendors, so sources, switches and time taggers from Brooklyn-based Qunnect, Swabian Instruments, and others plug in the same way.

What this means for the road ahead 

The Cisco Universal Quantum Switch made it physically possible to route quantum information between devices that speak different languages. Our Controller makes it operationally possible to decide, continuously, which of those routes gets built, for whom, and when. Nobody has to keep a hand on every part anymore; we can now treat the quantum network as a system that delivers a service – whether it is to the application developer, to the operator, or to the hardware device vendor.

The Controller

The Compiler is available now as a free 30-day trail, and teams interested in building on the Controller can contact us.

Contact Us

Join us at the Cisco Quantum Research Summit this week, and register for our free, virtual Shift.Forward() conference on October 27, 2026.