The USA has laid out plans for a ‘virtually unhackable’ national quantum internet that would promise secure communications and transport huge volumes of data.
The first steps are already well underway but a prototype is still likely to be 10 years in the making.
It its blueprint strategy, the US Department of Energy, said its plan would bring the US to the forefront of the global quantum race and bring in a new era of communications.
In February of this year, scientists from DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory in Lemont, Illinois, and the University of Chicago entangled photons across a 52-mile “quantum loop” in the Chicago suburbs, successfully establishing one of the longest land-based quantum networks in the nation. That network will soon be connected to DOE’s Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois, establishing a three-node, 80-mile testbed.
Early quantum internet users are expected to be banking and health services, as well as national security and aircraft communications and scientists see the technology eventually having an impact on mobile phone users around the world.