UAH | News | The University of Alabama in Huntsville

The next great battle for national security may not be fought over who has the fastest computer, but over who can protect the information moving between them. The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) hosted Noel Goddard, CEO of Qunnect, Inc., as part of its Distinguished Lecture Series to address the promise and challenges of these advances that are already working to shape our collective futures. UAH is part of The University of Alabama System.

“Quantum technology is going to touch your lives,” Goddard said. “It’s going to do so in the next 10 years. A lot of times, people joke about the fact that quantum computing is always 10 years ahead. But realistically speaking, quantum is a science developed in the 1920s. So, the idea that we’re only 100 years downstream, and we’ve learned how to take things that were very difficult to realize experimentally, and now we can actually engineer with them, is the springboard for the next technology revolution.”

One of quantum technology’s most urgent applications is cybersecurity. Today’s digital economy depends on encryption to protect banking, online purchases, private communications and sensitive information. More powerful computing systems, however, could eventually undermine some of the mathematical problems on which conventional encryption relies.

Goddard also met with UAH students studying physics, computer science and engineering.

Alexis Cortez | UAH

“For banking, when you do a Zoom call, when you make an Amazon transaction, all things like these are protected, and when cybersecurity is working, you take it for granted. And when it’s not, everybody’s at risk,” Goddard pointed out. “The encryption we use today was invented in the 70s, and it has withstood the test of time. But it has been a primary target of advanced computing power for those who want to take down our systems. So, this is why quantum networking also has a big role in security.”

Harnessing quantum entanglement

Quantum networking offers a different approach to protecting information by harnessing the physical properties of quantum systems. At the center of Qunnect’s technology is a phenomenon known as “entanglement,” in which separate quantum particles share correlations that can be used to establish and verify quantum information.

“You can create light particles from a single event where the pair is created at the same time,” Goddard explained. “Because they came from one event, they’re correlated strongly in terms of their quantum states. The correlation itself is the information which we preserve when we try to send it over the network. So, if I keep one and I send one to you, then we should know this, because it came from the same event.”

Those correlations can provide a means of checking whether information has been disturbed during transmission, supporting security protocols that differ fundamentally from conventional mathematical encryption.

“It turns out that all of our encryption systems are mathematically based, and if you would like to be able to create something which is quantum-proof, it needs to harness the rules of quantum to fight quantum,” the speaker said. “So, we develop systems where the encryption of the information itself is physically encrypted onto the particles themselves.”

Entanglement is also delicate, however. Interactions with the environment can disrupt these correlations, making it difficult to preserve them as photons that are traveling through real-world networks. Goddard said developing equipment that can distribute entanglement without corrupting those correlations has been a central focus of Qunnect’s work.

“If you can deliver the actual entanglement to its location, then you can do things today without a quantum computer. So, security protocols are natural, because you have a pair of bits which were physically defined at the time of creation which you can now use in order to have absolute information that the sender and receiver can check against each other.”

From laboratory to commercial networks

The company Goddard leads, Qunnect, is helping to advance quantum technologies specifically for networking. The firm introduced the world’s first commercial room temperature quantum memory, which was named one of TIME’s Best Inventions of 2026. Qunnect has also deployed more quantum networks around the world than any other company in the United States.

Making quantum networking practical requires more than demonstrating entanglement in a controlled laboratory. Systems must operate reliably on existing infrastructure, alongside conventional digital traffic. Qunnect has developed a system designed to generate and distribute entanglement over standard telecommunications fiber.

“Bandwidth is money. We want to do this with the same fiber that we use to carry digital data traffic,” Goddard said. “So, every experiment that we do with them or demonstrate on their networks are done on the same fiber carrying digital data traffic, and we’ve shown that our devices can actually withstand that and perform very, very well. We took it from basic research to commercial prototype to actual commercialization. We’re super proud of that. It took five years, but we sold our first racks in 2024, the only turn-key solution for creating and distributing entanglement over standard network fiber.

“The process is a set of devices which preserve that entanglement on fiber, so you can think of them a little bit like noise-canceling headphones,” Goddard noted. “Then it has something that validates it on the other side.”

Using existing fiber infrastructure ultimately will make quantum networking more scalable without requiring an entirely separate network. Qunnect has already demonstrated entanglement-based networks using commercial fiber in both New York City and Berlin, over fiber segments spanning 15 – 100km. Sustained performance is essential to demonstrating that quantum networking can function beyond laboratory conditions.

“It was exciting when we plugged it in,” Goddard said. “Not only did it work, but we eventually got the performance to the fact that we could actually run it weeks at a time with 99% uptime and 99% fidelity on the day of transmission. That’s not a science experiment, that’s a network.”

The company is also working with the National Institute of Standards and Technology to address challenges involving aerial fiber, which is exposed to temperature changes, wind, storms and vibration.

Preparing for a quantum future

Goddard envisions quantum networks eventually connecting quantum computers across data centers, enabling systems to share quantum information, much as conventional computers communicate over today’s internet.

“So, if you have a digital internet and you think about how digital devices are connected by digital networks, we want to create a world where there are quantum computers connected by quantum networks,” she said.

Quantum computing itself is not a universal solution to every difficult problem, the CEO cautioned. Its strengths most likely include selected optimization challenges and modeling materials that could advance things like medicine, batteries and other technologies, for example.

“Quantum computing, I think, is misrepresented a bit in the public eye, as if every hard problem that we have today will be easily solved,” the speaker said. “That’s a bit of a stretch.”

During her visit, the Qunnect CEO also met with UAH students studying physics, computer science and engineering, emphasizing the importance of preparing graduates for emerging technology careers. “I actually think that quantum networking and quantum sensing are going to make true advances in the next five years, maybe three to five years,” she noted.

Meanwhile, the need to prepare for potential encryption vulnerabilities is immediate. Goddard said increasingly capable artificial intelligence could help uncover weaknesses in sophisticated algorithms, adding to the cybersecurity challenges facing the United States. Developing quantum technologies requires both realistic expectations and urgency, particularly as computing power advances and cybersecurity threats evolve.

“If quantum computers can break current encryption, we have to have a backup plan, and as many defensive solutions as we can possibly develop,” Goddard concluded. “As we have the ability to do so in the U.S., we should.”