"QUANTUM: encryption milestone reached"
A prototype quantum-key distribution system may move from lab to commercial systems as early as next year, NEC Corp. reports. Company researchers have completed the prototype, NEC said, and the needed software is now being written. NEC described its progress to the 30th European Conference on Optical Communication (www.ecoc.se). At the conference, held last month in Stockholm, Sweden, NEC described how it overcame previously reported obstacles. It said researchers had successfully encoded, modulated and added a clock signal to their single-photon transmissions, achieving a sustained quantum-key distribution (QKD) rate of 100 kbits/second over a distance of about 25 miles. The researchers predicted that NEC will likely begin delivering commercial QKD systems based on their prototype by the end of 2005.