What came next changed the region and prepared Chattanooga for its unexpected role as “Gig City.” Utilizing its fiber optic smart grid infrastructure, EPB launched America’s first community-wide Gig speed Internet service in 2010. In 2014, DOE named EPB a living lab for Smart Grid Research. Since then, EPB has partnered with Oak Ridge National Laboratory along with other national labs and private companies on a range of efforts to bring research technologies out of the lab and into the real world. Today, EPB continues to build upon Chattanooga smart city infrastructure with a $70 million system-wide upgrade that facilitated the launch of America’s first 25 Gig Internet service last summer. All of these efforts also serve as the basis for the recent launch of a new project to help accelerate the development of quantum technologies.

EPB Quantum Network

In 2017, EPB and Qubitekk collaborated to participate in an R&D 100 award-winning effort with Oak Ridge and Los Alamos National Laboratories that ran quantum encryption technologies across real-world fiber optic loops that EPB established between some of its electric substations. Achieving a proving ground of transmitting qubits in a test-bed environment then led EPB and Qubitekk to build EPB Quantum Network powered by Qubitekk^SM, a comprehensive quantum network solution.

As a result of this work, EPB Quantum Network integrates a fiber optic infrastructure with the latest foundational quantum equipment and software to accelerate the process for bringing quantum technologies to market. It is designed to generate, distribute and measure qubits on EPB’s established 100 percent fiber optic network while:

• Allowing users to maintain their Intellectual Property
• Providing secure individual physical workspaces
• Staffing with expert Qubitekk quantum engineers
• Providing network flexibility to accommodate virtually endless uses
• Maintaining an easily scalable fiber optic network

EPB Quantum Network architecture features equipment hubs that house common-use quantum equipment, with nodes across Chattanooga that will facilitate exchanging qubits across a dedicated fiber optic network. At the heart of the network is Qubitekk’s Bohr IV^TM platform that provides innovators access to the latest generation equipment and technology to validate their developments, which can be easily scaled to support growing demand, including:

• Photonic qubit sources
• 4 parallel qubit channels
• Single photon counting detectors
• Quantum-compatible fiber optics switches
• Flexible, software-defined network architecture
• Dedicated fiber optic lines for distributing qubits
• Precision timing

Network configuration is designed to be flexible to accommodate multiple uses from validating quantum product performance to testing new quantum technologies and confirming equipment interoperability to running quantum security applications. This will accelerate the deployment of near-term business applications, provide verification of emerging quantum devices, and support the larger technical goals of the quantum information science community.

Ultimately, to speed the development, adoption and integration of quantum products across the marketplace, innovators, businesses, entrepreneurs, researchers, government agencies and universities must be able to connect to the quantum future. That’s what EPB Quantum Network seeks to do by providing a place for public and private sector quantum innovations to be run in an established fiber optic environment.

What’s next

EPB’s investment in Smart Grid technology continues to demonstrate the future-proof nature of fiber. Quantum networking wasn’t on the drawing board when EPB built out Chattanooga’s fiber optic network more than a decade ago, but fiber optics continue to keep our community on the cutting edge of networking technology.  

Beyond a point of pride for the region and our industry, EPB Quantum Network will support groundbreaking work that will be difference-making for generations. Through the development of new technologies only possible in the quantum age, it will advance new kinds of jobs, new educational opportunities, better healthcare solutions and much more.