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I can almost hear the collective groan. AI Copilots haven’t even reached the trough of disillusionment and already we’re talking about distant technologies such as quantum. However, Cisco made an announcement this week that I found interesting because it offers a parallel to something far more technologically historic.
If we go all the way back to 1986, a good year for Liverpool supporters, Cisco shipped their first router. The Cisco AGS (Advanced Gateway Server) started it all for the networking giant. In an era before IP dominated, the AGS was a multi-protocol router that sat between TCP/IP, DECnet, AppleTalk and IPX networks. In addition, it supported serial and other interface types, as well as Ethernet. So, while it did route packets between different IP subnets, its significance was the ability to translate between different types of networks.
Fast forward 40 years, not a good year for Liverpool supporters, and Cisco have introduced the UQS (Universal Quantum Switch). It is very much a prototype, in a very nascent industry but it potentially solves two major problems for quantum computing. The first has parallels with the AGS because quantum computer vendors today all use their own proprietary encoding and entanglement modalities and the UQS translates between them. Secondly, the size of quantum computers today limits their practical application but networking them may accelerate their capability. Other key features of the Cisco UQS are...
- Low-latency with nanosecond switching.
- Operation at room temperature (although the quantum computers themselves may not).
- Energy consumption of less than 1 milliwatt.
- Less than or equal to 4% degradation in quantum state fidelity.
https://newsroom.cisco.com/c/r/newsroom/en/us/a/y2026/m04/cisco-introduces-universal-quantum-switch-advancing-the-path-to-a-quantum-network.html