Before you bring your hardware to ABQ-Net, you should know exactly what you’re going to get when you plug in. So this week, we published a white paper to show you the numbers behind America’s first open-access quantum network.

The network performed over 48 hours of continuous testing on deployed aerial fiber in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Best of all, the network is available to anyone who wants to build on it.

ABQ-Net links our node at Qunnect’s facilities in downtown Albuquerque to the Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies at Sandia National Laboratories over 25 kilometers of commercial fiber. Any qualified team from government, academia, or industry can apply to connect hardware and test their technology.

If you decide to connect, here is what you can expect:

• Six strands of 25km deployed fibers, each fully characterized for loss at O and C band, together with measured polarization and propagation time drifts over 24 hours.
• Entangled photon pairs. More than 210,000 pairs per second across the 25-kilometer link for 90% of a 48-hour run.
• Error rate. A quantum bit error rate between 9% and 13% across the middle 80% of that run—the good news is that the actual QBER is half of the reported values due to the measuring techniques.
• Entanglement over distance. On a 50-kilometer loop, measured CHSH values held between 2.50 and 2.62 over 24 hours, well above the classical limit of 2.0. The photons stayed entangled through a full day of testing.
• Stability in the field. Qunnect’s Carina hardware, through its automatic polarization compensator, corrects fiber-induced polarization drift in real time. The route mixes both buried and aerial fiber, and the aerial sections are exposed to Albuquerque’s wind and temperature swings.
• Access. Users control the system through software and can plug in their own compatible hardware, without building every piece of an entanglement distribution system themselves.

We publish this data for two reasons. The first is as a reference for the people who are considering the network to have the information they need. We believe any company deciding whether to test its technology on ABQ-Net should be able to see exactly what the network delivers, and how well it does so.

The second is that our industry has a hype problem. Quantum networks are announced far more often than their results are shared, and few operators publish how their networks actually perform. Anyone building quantum infrastructure should be held to that standard, and we held ourselves to it first.

New Mexico commissioned ABQ-Net to give companies and researchers a place to prove quantum technology in real conditions. The network went live in February, and by July four companies had committed to using it. Infleqtion is testing ultra-precise timing over the network. Tensora is using its data to improve geosensing. Bandelier Technologies, a New Mexico company, is studying how entanglement and AI can protect critical infrastructure, and Aliro is running its network software on the live fiber.

A company that proves its technology on ABQ-Net can trust the result in the field and avoid millions in costs from building a quantum testbed of its own. I’ve often said that the early internet testbeds became the sandbox for the next decade of innovation. ABQ-Net is that sandbox for quantum networking.

And it is open for business today.

Read the full ABQ-Net white paper. Researchers and companies interested in testing on ABQ-Net can reach our team at contact@quconn.com.