New Podcast Episode: Quantum Networking Research at ESnet

In April, ESnet Executive Director Inder Monga, who is also lead P.I. for the QUANT-NET project, sat for a podcast interview about what the quantum internet will look like — and what it will take to build it. See Quantum @ ESnet for an overview of all ESnet's quantum networking projects. 
 

Transcript: 

Expert Interview: ESnet's Inder Monga on Quantum Networking
Host: Sara Harmon, Guest: Inder Monga
Air Date: April 16,  2026

Sara Harmon: Hi, I'm Sara Harmon and I'm a science communicator at Berkeley Lab's Energy Sciences Network, or ESnet. ESnet is the data circulatory system for the US Department of Energy, Office of Science, and we transfer data for all DOE supported research. I'm excited today to be talking to ESnet's executive director, Inder Monga, to learn more about this amazing infrastructure. Inder, can you please tell us more about ESnet?

Inder Monga: Hi, Sara. Great to talk to you.

ESnet is involved in building the infrastructure of tomorrow available to the Department of Energy funded researchers to further the science mission. These researchers can be at the national lab or at the university ecosystem where they're funded, and we work with our partners to make sure this capability is available to them.

This network works almost as an invisible infrastructure connecting all the 17 national labs, 28 user facilities together. And in terms of statistics, this constitutes 15,000 miles of fiber, 70 terabytes of total capacity of bandwidth available, and a footprint that spans the west coast of the US all the way to Europe.

Now I am really excited about this because data generated at the large Hadron Collider in Geneva is moved over these transatlantic lines that go under the ocean and is available for physicists in the US to analyze and find discoveries. Just like the Higgs Boson which got the Nobel Prize in physics.

So these discoveries are enabled by the data circulatory system that you mentioned ESnet is. Now ESnet is also a core component of the Genesis mission by being member of the American Science Cloud implementation team. And we are seeing more and more need for network and network capacity in order to enable AI for science and to meet the needs of the high performance computing mission.

But that's not it. The genesis mission includes Quantum, and we think ESnet can help with the quantum mission as well that is of strategic importance to this country.

Sara Harmon: Related to that, you're also the principal investigator of a separate DOE funded project QUANT-NET, or the Quantum Application Network Test Bed for Novel Entanglement Technology. Can you tell us a little bit more about how ESnet got involved in quantum networking research?

Inder Monga: ESnet was formed in 1986 and we became early contributors to the formation of the classical internet as it exists today. And the way the classical internet started was researchers trying to connect two classical computers together and exchanging data between them. So as ESnet, we have a lot of experience in taking new technologies and new innovations from the lab and deploying them in operations.

We wanted to play the same role for quantum networking, and bring together engineers, protocol developers from ESnet with the physicists and researchers that truly understand the physics behind quantum from UC Berkeley, and Caltech and Innsbruck together, and that is how QUANT-NET as an uh, DOE funded project got initiated.

Sara Harmon: What makes ESnet a unique environment to conduct quantum networking research?

Inder Monga: Many of the quantum networking labs have physicists but not network experts. ESnet has experts in classical networking, we run and operate networks 24 by seven, so we know what are the challenges that need to be solved, how automated it should be, how to manage distributed infrastructure at different locations.

Now, it is not a linear path. The challenges are very different from classical networking, but we are leveraging that knowledge to help and work with physicists, scientists, and researchers, and solve some of the engineering problems to get it in that direction.
By being in Berkeley lab and close to UC Berkeley, we can have all the knowledge to bring this diverse group of researchers, experts together in order to solve this challenging problem. 

Sara Harmon: Does the proximity to Silicon Valley and also being close to several other DOE National Labs play into any collaborations you might have or any of the research?

Inder Monga: I think there is definitely an advantage. There is a hotbed of quantum computing startups and network technologies that are in the Silicon Valley. Berkeley has a center where they are planning to get people from academia, industry and national labs together. And there are National Labs, Livermore, Sandia, and SLAC that are working on the same problem. Research is a global community, so there is a lot of sharing and interaction happening on these topics.

Sara Harmon: Can you explain a little bit more about what exactly is quantum networking and how it works?

Inder Monga: Actually, that is a very challenging question because when we talk about quantum networking, there are many different ways to interpret what it is. For example, one of the more popular ones is what is called quantum key distribution or quantum security. They use quantum information exchange to encrypt and secure classical data.

But that is not what the researchers that are working on the quantum internet mean. What they talk about is distributing quantum entanglement, uh, across longer distances. This is not about volume of information. Unlike classical networking, which depends on sending large volumes of information like videos or large scientific data sets between national labs to supercomputers; this is about distributed entanglement before we lose coherence.

What we have to do in quantum networking is to distribute that entanglement between these two computers and that is kind of the basis of quantum networking. This entanglement is really fragile, does not last for a long time. And because we are transmitting it over fiber, anything can happen that may destroy this entanglement through interference. So this is really hard to do.

Sara Harmon: The QUANT-NET research team recently released the open source control plane software. Can you tell us about the significance of the software?

Inder Monga: When we started on this research, we noticed a lot of the work was being done manually; grad students, postdocs that were tweaking, calibrating and making connections in order to distribute qubits. And while that was perfectly fine for a physics experiment, we wanted to develop technologies that would help move this out of the lab and into the real world. And one of the things that is important in order to do that is to allow software based control. What functions are automatable and how do we develop a software control framework that allows software to operate this network rather than humans to operate this network?

And that is what led to the control plane software architecture itself being very modular, users or applications can drive and interact with this quantum network.

So this is the software stack that we have released. And that was shown at a couple of conferences and that led us to decide because we could not find other people implementing the same thing, to release this as open source. Now, you might question why we released it as open source. Our goal is to support all the research that is going on in this field and to actually move this field forward.

So by releasing this as open source, our intent is that other test beds don't have to spend that same time and energy we did in developing that software, but leverage what we have done and push it forward and contribute back to the open source platform. So the community gets a software stack that they can use to build new kinds of quantum networks without building that software system from scratch.

Sara Harmon: What are the next steps for quantum networking research at ESnet?

Inder Monga: One of the things that's really inspiring us is to figure out how quantum networking can enhance the push towards classical- quantum systems and how they interact in terms of computing. We are doing a lot of simulations and coming up with this blueprint for a quantum data center where we can have hybrid systems connecting with each other working together with classical systems in order to solve some of the scientific challenges with quantum computing.

This is very similar to how the classical internet developed, where initially there were a whole number of protocols that were being invented in order to do networking. And as the community played with them, we learned what works well and what doesn't work well, and we narrowed the choices. So right now is the time to have many flowers bloom. This is the research direction of how do we enable distributed quantum computing to scale quantum computing.

Sara Harmon: Do you have an estimate of when we might see a quantum internet deployed?

Inder Monga: I do not have a number for you, but I do think in, in the next five years, we will have definite proof that what we have developed is on its path to be deployed as the quantum internet.

Now one of the bigger challenges that still exists is building a quantum repeater, which is a mechanism to transfer quantum information, similar to routers in the classical internet today. They allow us to send information at long distances without losing that information as photons travel.

So until that gets done and built reliably, we won't see the quantum internet, like the classical internet, which is spanning the globe.

Sara Harmon: Will the eventual implementation change the service that ESnet offers?

Inder Monga: I think I can view this question in a couple of different ways. One is, will the quantum internet replace the classical internet? And the answer to that is no.

We really don't know how this technology will change, but I do envision that ESnet will likely be operating a classical network and in parallel a quantum network.

I think that is what keeps ESnet interesting and at the cutting edge. We are always trying to do new things and we will have to work with the new way to deploy quantum internet when that gets available or when we research and develop it ourselves.

Sara Harmon: Thank you for taking the time out of your day to answer my questions. I've really learned so much. 

Inder Monga: Thank you, Sara.