KETS is pleased to announce that we have won a £1.7m contract funded by Innovate UK to develop our next generation QKD solution. The Small Business Research Initiative (SBRI) competition aims to accelerate the development of enabling components and systems for quantum network technologies and to build UK leadership in the emerging global market.

Our contract-winning submission focuses on Delivering a system Hardened, Scalable, and Interoperable QKD solution (DHSI-QKD).

This project delivers a next generation QKD solution designed for telecommunications production environments. This system addresses additional near-term market demands not met by current offerings; namely, high levels of security, robustness, and networking flexibility – all whilst being delivered at speed and at scale.

As deployment of QKD becomes more widespread, transitioning from lab-based verification to national testbeds & commercial trials and services, network and data centre operators are increasingly demanding features in QKD products that are standard in other technologies in their operational stack.

The challenge is threefold:

• deployment in mission critical data environments demands a level of security currently not widely available in QKD systems,
• deployment in complex networks requires a level of flexibility not easily achieved with point-to-point QKD products,
• and as the demand for quantum-safe communications grows, the solutions must be extremely reliable and available at scale.

Whilst current QKD systems can offer some of these features, there is not a single product on the market that can meet the full set of requirements. As a result, there is a significant opportunity for an entrant into the market that can provide the scale, security, and flexibility that customers are demanding.

We will establish the interoperability of our devices with an industry-leading third-party QKD key relay and management software suite, BasejumpQDN, from evolutionQ and they will be tested for suitability in future quantum-safe networks by end-user BT.

By delivering a QKD system that meets the key demands from the market of security, reliability, and flexibility at scale for the first time, we can ensure that the UK can be at the heart of the global supply chain for commercial quantum-safe communications.