February 19, 2026 -- While teleporting people remains science fiction, teleporting quantum information is now a practical reality. T-Labs, the research and development division within Deutsche Telekom, and Qunnect, the quantum networking pioneer, have successfully demonstrated quantum teleportation over a commercial network in Berlin, marking a major milestone in advancing deployable quantum technologies on existing telecommunications infrastructure. By using newly commercial technologies to overcome instabilities and interferences in existing telecom infrastructure, T-Labs and Qunnect demonstrated how a telecommunications operator can integrate quantum teleportation capabilities into operational networks.

During trials conducted in a real-world telecom environment in January 2026, the team achieved quantum teleportation over 30 km of commercial fiber cables. The experiment was performed using Qunnect’s commercially available quantum entanglement distribution hardware and Deutsche Telekom’s Berlin quantum infrastructure, representing the first practical test of core components required for a future teleportation service. For this demonstration.

Paving the way for the future quantum internet

Quantum teleportation is a key building block for the future quantum internet enabling the transfer of quantum information between distant locations. It does this by recreating an identical quantum state of a particle at the destination using pre-shared quantum entanglement rather than transmitting a physical particle.

“Our fiber optic network is quantum ready,” says Abdu Mudesir, Telekom Board Member for Product and Technology. "In Berlin we have now proven that quantum information can be transmitted over 30 kilometers of commercial Telekom fiber optics outside of a laboratory. This is done in parallel with regular data traffic and with a very high average accuracy of 90 percent. With quantum teleportation, we are laying the technical foundation for networking quantum computers over longer distances in the future and pooling computing power in more than one location. This will create the next generation of secure communication and a building block for Europe's technological sovereignty."

“Teleportation is a novel tool for moving information around networks leveraging quantum physics,” said Mael Flament, Chief Technology Officer at Qunnect. “We are showing the building blocks of teleportation can operate inside a real network, in real racks, under operator control, advancing it from a laboratory experiment to something a telecommunications provider can deploy.”

Quantum teleportation unlocks new applications for quantum networks including quantum cryptography, distributed quantum computing, secure cloud-based quantum services paving the way for quantum data centers, and networks of highly sensitive quantum sensors.

The demonstration

The trial teleported qubits generated by a weak coherent source over a 30-km fiber loop connecting T-Lab’s Quantum Lab to a node on the Berlin fiber testbed. Qunnect’s Carina platform integrates an entanglement generator that produces pairs of quantum-entangled photons for distribution over telecom fiber, along with a polarization compensation component that counteracts environmentally induced noise in both buried and aerial fiber, enabling high-rate, high-fidelity transport of quantum bits between network nodes. As a result, the teams achieved teleportation fidelities at an average of 90%, according to the preliminary publication of the data. At its peak, an accuracy of 95 percent was achieved.

Importantly, the teleportation part is done at a wavelength (795nm) essential for many      platforms such as neutral-atom quantum computers, atomic clocks, and various quantum sensors, paving the path for connecting such systems to the telecom infrastructure for the future quantum internet.  

The achievement builds directly on a series of earlier field trials carried out by the same partners, which progressively demonstrated quantum networking over metropolitan fiber links. Qunnect, Deutsche Telekom, and other partners will extend this demonstration to multi-node teleportation configurations, expanding the distance across which they will transfer quantum states. This expansion will evaluate broader deployment and next generation use cases within a metro-scale carrier network infrastructure.