BT–Toshiba London commercial QKD metro

BT–Toshiba London commercial QKD metro

A QKD-secured metro network sold as a managed service. BT operates the fibre and the service wrapper; Toshiba supplies the QKD hardware. The first customer, EY, used the network to link its Canary Wharf office to its London Bridge office, with launch on 26 April 2022 and an initial three-year operating term.

Operator
BT (managed service) · Toshiba (QKD devices) · EY (launch customer)
Location
London, UK (City / Canary Wharf metro fibre)
Year
Launched 26 April 2022; initial three-year term
Technology
Prepare-and-measure QKD over standard fibre-optic links; Toshiba QKD systems developed at the Cambridge labs
Scale
London metro
Status
Operational commercial trial
Commercial model
Paid managed service; EY connected two offices and pays for the QKD-secured channel

What it is

BT and Toshiba launched the network at BT Tower on 26 April 2022, with EY as the first commercial customer. The infrastructure is a metro QKD overlay on standard fibre, marketed as the first commercial trial of quantum-secured communication services. The QKD link replaces the channel that traditionally distributes symmetric keys for IPsec or similar tunnels between sites; the quantum guarantee is information-theoretic on the key delivery, while the data plane stays classical and uses the QKD-derived keys to encrypt traffic. BT/Toshiba 2022 (London QKD launch)

Verified claims

Things to note

  • Scope of the "world's first commercial QKD network" framing. Earlier commercial QKD services existed (e.g. Geneva 2007 election fibre, SwissQuantum); BT–Toshiba is the first commercial QKD trial offered by a tier-1 carrier in the UK as a productised managed service.
  • Prepare-and-measure, not entanglement-based. The QKD systems use Toshiba's prepare-and-measure protocols; the metro span is short enough that trusted relays are not part of the visible architecture.
  • Quantum-secured key distribution; classical data plane. Data traffic between EY's offices runs through classical encryption keyed by the QKD output, so the end-to-end security rests on classical key handling at the endpoints.
  • Paid trial, not a catalogue product. The service is a bilateral arrangement with EY plus selected follow-on customers; it is not a public BT product offered through the standard catalogue.