Q*Bird Port of Rotterdam MDI-QKD pilot

Q*Bird Port of Rotterdam MDI-QKD pilot

A multi-node MDI-QKD pilot in a working industrial port — the first commercial deployment of measurement-device-independent QKD outside the lab. Q*Bird's Falqon hub sits in a Eurofiber data centre and performs Bell-state measurements between photons emitted by end nodes at the Port of Rotterdam Authority and Dutch Customs, with the QUEST follow-on extending the architecture across South Holland from 2025.

Operator
Q*Bird · Single Quantum · Cisco · Eurofiber · Portbase · Intermax · InnovationQuarter · Port of Rotterdam Authority (under Quantum Delta NL)
Location
Port of Rotterdam, Netherlands
Year
Pilot announced May 2024; QUEST expansion programme running 2025-2026
Technology
Measurement-Device-Independent QKD (MDI-QKD) — Q*Bird Falqon hub-and-spoke; Single Quantum SNSPDs; decoy-state intensities
Scale
Metropolitan; central hub plus end nodes at Port Authority and Customs, with QUEST adding interconnected hubs across South Holland
Status
Operational pilot; QUEST expansion in progress
Commercial model
Public-private pilot under Quantum Delta NL; QUEST funded by Quantum Delta NL, ERDF and Kansen voor West

What it is

MDI-QKD removes detector side-channel attacks — the dominant family of practical attacks on prepare-and-measure QKD — by moving the photon detectors out of Alice's and Bob's labs and into an untrusted middle station. Each end node emits weak coherent pulses toward the middle; the middle performs a Bell-state measurement and announces the outcome on a public channel. Alice and Bob then sift their key from their preparation records. Because the middle station only performs the BSM (and never sees the bit values), it can be operated by an untrusted third party. Port of Rotterdam / Q*Bird 2024 (MDI-QKD pilot announcement)

Q*Bird productises this as the Falqon hub-and-spoke architecture: one BSM hub serves many end nodes that share the same fibre infrastructure into the hub. In Rotterdam the hub is hosted in a Eurofiber data centre — neutral telco ground rather than any one tenant's premises — and Single Quantum supplies the superconducting-nanowire single-photon detectors. Cisco contributes the classical-control and networking layer that orchestrates the end-node QKD devices. Port of Rotterdam / Q*Bird 2024 (MDI-QKD pilot announcement)

Verified claims

Things to note

  • MDI-QKD, not entanglement distribution. The hub performs a Bell-state measurement on photons emitted by end nodes; no entangled pair source is involved. The "MDI" guarantee is that the BSM hub can be untrusted, not that the network distributes entanglement.
  • Same trusted-endpoint assumption as any QKD link. The QKD output is a symmetric key delivered to Alice's and Bob's classical machines; everything that happens to the key after delivery (storage, use in IPsec / MACsec / app-layer crypto) rests on classical security at the endpoints.
  • Pilot, not a productised carrier service. The deployment is a co-funded public-private pilot under Quantum Delta NL, not a paid managed service offered through a tier-1 carrier catalogue (contrast BT–Toshiba London).
  • Key rate vs. distance trade-off is the standard MDI-QKD curve. No published key-rate-versus-distance figures for the Rotterdam hub yet; Q*Bird's published spec sheet for related Falqon deployments quotes 30-50 km hub-to-node fibre.