Introduction to Quantum Computing and Communications with BT

Okay, thanks for having me, uh, thrilled to do this. Who am I and who's bt? Um, so I mean, I'm proud to say that we are the, the oldest communications company in the world.

Um, our roots go back a very long time to original parcel are around graph. Um, we have now a, a big, uh, research lab, and you can see the beautiful picture of them there, uh, to Daper Park, uh, which is in a sunny part of England, uh, about an hour from London. And for me, I've spent, um, I mean a whole career with bt, um, not doing quantum.

So quantum has been a fairly recent thing for me. I, I will say that when I did my, um, my physics degree back at Oxford in 1982, um, we spent a whole year looking at Quantum and I thought, this is a complete waste of time. I'm never gonna need this.

And that was absolutely true for about 25 years. And suddenly everything changed. And, uh, all of that original work I did in my, um, in my undergrad, uh, has become really useful.

Um, I have a lot of, um, experience in looking at quantum, uh, in the context of industrial applications. Okay, so I'm not an academic. Uh, I do publish, I do, I lead conferences, but my big interest here is, uh, how do we commercialize this?

How do we turn this into something useful, uh, that can make money? Um, and what are the kind of hooks of quantum into a company like bd, uh, which is the telecom company? So that's the journey we're on.

And let's crack on. This is section one. Um, and this is really setting, and I'm conscious of what everybody in the room or online is gonna be at the same level, uh, when it comes to the content.

So what I really want to do here is, um, talk about it, what do I mean by the word? 'cause the word is getting thrown around all over the place. Um, and it's potentially being misused.

Um, and, and really just to put enough non mathematical background so that we're all kind of in the same place. Uh, and just to point out at this point, and I'll probably mention it again, it is actually an exciting year for Quantum that a hundred years since, um, something happened. But, but quantum was established in terms of the principles of quantum, uh, that I'm going about to go over.

Um, so we're all celebrating and there's, uh, an international year of quantum, although it feels to me like there's been an international year of quantum for quite a while now. But this, this is a really big inter international year of quantum. Um, lots of celebrations, lots of activities globally, lots, big event.

Um, so it's definitely worth following that. Okay, so let's crack on. What do I mean by it?

Now, the other day, I got a train to London, that train is, we would knock, dial a big object. It's clear, we can see it, we can measure it, we can see where it is, we can measure how fast it's going. Everything about that crane is characterizable on the right.

There's a picture of an atom, at least an attempted picture. And none of those things apply. You cannot intrinsically locate that Aman space not accurately.

And yet, and worse, it might not even be one place. It might be more than one place at once, or it might have multiple energy states or multiple other states at the same time. And that's nothing to do with my measurement technique.

That doesn't, that's not saying I've got a bad microscope. I mean, I have, but that's not the point. The point is, even if I had the most accurate size microscope in the world, that asso will still be fuzzy because quantum means an innate un uncertainty.

It's just built in. Now, we find that difficult because we're used to trains, um, and we're not, we don't have a kind of direct touch or feel for, for the quantum world, but this is the case. We are made up of atoms that exhibit this behavior, and if they didn't, we wouldn't be here.

So quantum is absolutely essential for, for chemistry, biology, uh, for a lot of the electronics that that, that we use in our daily lives. Now, there's another thing, and, and this is where it gets a little bit more obscure. And, and hence some of the jokes that we've already had from Tom.

Um, and this, this is harder to understand, but nevertheless, just as important, it's called entanglement. And this is when you take not just one atom, but two. But how, how is it that when I take two atoms, um, things suddenly get much more complicated?

And it's this thing called entanglement. What do I mean? So I'm picturing there a pink and a red atom.

The pink atom is clearly spinning up and spinning down at the same time. The red atom is also spinning up and spinning down at the same time. So they're both in these fuzzy kind of un delocalized states, but I've done something to them, and we can talk about what that is.

It's not trivial, but it's doable. I can do something to entangle these actions. What does that mean?

It means that they're both still in these fuzzy states, but they're somehow linked. Now, they might not be anywhere near each other. They might be at other parts of the world or other parts of the, of the universe, but they're still linked.

Um, what that means is if I was to now go to the pink one and make a measurement, it would instantly and it's instant affect the other one without, without communicating. So there's some kind of weird connection that is not a comms link. It's not a cheat wire, nothing, um, that I can kind of get hold of.

Um, but nevertheless, there is this link and it's an entanglement link. That means that if I was to look at that pink atom and measure it, if it decided it was spinning up, that information would be instantly communicated to the red atom, which would also now be spinning up. And if on the other hand, the pink atom that I look at is somehow spinning down, and by the way, I have no choice over that, that pink atom will decide whatever it does, it's, it's random.

It's not something that I can dictate that I get what I get. But what I do know is that when I've got a result on the pink one that is completely mirrored on the red one, even though they're not next to each other, even though they might never have been next to each other, even though, and I just to push this to the limit, they might not have even existed at the same time. Entanglement is weird.

Einstein hated the idea of it and used it as, as a major criticism for quantum physics and said, this can't be right. Now. I'm not gonna go into the, the, the philosophy of all of that today.

Fascinating though. It is what I want to do today is say, this is useful. Are these two properties of fuzziness and entanglement useful?

And it's absolutely yes, massively useful. And I want to just on this slide, give you at least a starting impression why that is so fascinatingly, uh, but, but powerful. Now, let's imagine I've got a single asto.

Um, it's a particle and it's in two states. In my third bullet point there, spinning up and down two states is not impressed. Let's say I've got two particles entangled together.

I now have a combination potential of four states. They could both be up, both be down, one could be up and down, and vice versa. Two to the power two, four studies isn't very much.

What if I go to 37 particles? Two to the power 37 is already bigger than the number of stars in the Milky way. 60 particles is bigger than all the number of grains of sand on the earth.

78 particles more than the stars in the universe. So you don't need many, you just need a few. And you have the potential for a vast in countable number of options.

Now, let's be clear about this. Um, a quantum computer is, uh, excuse me, is a, um, collection of these atoms all entangled, but, and, and the power there, it looks enormous, doesn't it? It looks like I can represent the vast calculations that I can't do on a computer, but actually I'm quite limited what I can do with those because they're all entangled together.

So I'm not, I can't just see anything with that collection of atom. But nevertheless, I hope you can see that with just a few, a few dozen, um, we call qubits now, or atoms or or photons entangled together. I have an untold power.

Quantum computers will break at some point existing crypto. Um, and so we, you know, we, we have a whole load of things that we need to consider based on this. Some of the areas that we can kind of extract from this, and I'm gonna talk about some of these.

The first one is clearly quantum computing. Uh, I'm not a quantum computer expert, but I want to talk enough about it because this is the big thing that is driving the industry. This is the elephant in the room that is sitting there and when it happens, it's going to transform many different areas.

Quantum secure comms springs out of that, the motivation to make sure our communications is ever more secure, and quantum computers are undermining that or threatening that. So I need to make sure that even when a quantum computer comes along, I'm in a good position with my network. Atoms and photons are really sensitive, so why don't I use them as sensors?

They're very accurate. So what about clocks? Um, and I can even do incredibly accurate imaging.

Things that the military are, are very interested in now, um, for bt, clearly we are a networking communication companies. So the, the second bullet there is the thing that we're, we're mainly focused on, but we're doing work in other areas as well. Timing is massive for us.

We run a synchronized network. Our 5G network is highly synced, so we care that, that that networks stays at two good times. So what, and I don't have many slides at all on market size or anything like that, so don't worry, I'm not gonna kind of fill you with stuff from the internet.

You can easily go and look that up, but I'm just gonna use one here. Um, now probably everybody is aware that this topic is getting enormous attention, trillions of dollars of investment. Um, you can see, uh, the big players there, China, who are probably quite unknown in terms of the overall, uh, uh, investments.

USA UK's third on this list really, really quite heartwarming for me. Um, the UK has been, uh, very proactive in terms of investing in quantum since about 2012. Um, and then you can see all, all the other players there, why, but what, what, I mean, quantum is clearly interesting, but why is it so motivational to unlock this level of funding?

And it's both government and private of VC funding, funding from everywhere. And the explanation is this picture on the left, the kinds of things we hope to be able to do. Any one of these could transform the planet.

Lemme just give you one or two examples. Um, let's imagine with a quantum computer, I can, uh, reproduce photosynthesis to the point where I can make some new fertilizers that are way lower in energy consumption than current manufacturing of ammonia. Um, we, we use vast amounts of energy just to make fertilizers to feed the planet, but what if we could, um, get, get rid of all of that and make a brand new catalyst that makes fertilizers much more cheaply or much lower energy consumption, transform the planet.

What about, um, making a material that can contain nuclear fusion, um, so that we have free energy from hydrogen, um, transform the planet. So we're talking, um, potential trillion, multi-trillion dollar global, um, transformations with quantum computers, but why are they so good at, or why do we hope that they're so good at doing this kind of thing? Um, and it's because there is a natural synergy between the quantum computer and the atoms that it's trying to model.

Yeah. So, so if I've got, um, a quantum computer based on atoms, it's not surprising that it's very good at modeling systems that are atoms. Um, and actually regular computers like my laptop sitting here is not very good at, at that because it's, it's not atoms in the first place that when it tries to model even simple things like water or ammonia or hydrogen has a tough job trying to, uh, model all of the dimensions involved in those molecules.

Um, quantum computers do that easily. So you don't need many qubits in a quantum computer to start to be, um, invention of new drugs, fertilizers, um, vaccines, um, and new materials for, you know, that, that incredibly high strength that. So that's one area.

The, the area of chemistry and biology. Other areas include, um, optimization. So financial markets, um, will be fascinated to use a quantum computer to more rapidly and more accurately, uh, optimize their portfolio.

Uh, and then any, any area where you need to optimize anything which needs, uh, minimization of energy consumption or cost, uh, all of these and multiple sectors are gonna benefit from, from running contributors. Okay. But, um, the good news is you don't need many qubits, just a few dozen.

How hard is that? Well, we're not there yet. Okay.

Um, we have, um, some but not enough to make what we call a, a quantum advantage. Now. Actually, the news changes every week, so I have to keep updating these slides at least three times before the talk today.

Um, and literally just last week, um, D wave announced that they had achieved a quantum advantage, um, quantum supremacy in an area, uh, uh, of chemistry. Uh, and that's been disputed and it's been discussed, but it, it shows you that we are right on the cusp of this kind of thing happening the week before Microsoft said the same thing or something similar that they, they'd made a lot of progress with their own specific type of quantum computer. Um, however, um, these qubits are very noisy and very fragile.

They don't last very long before essentially evaporating. Um, so they don't, they don't keep that entanglement together for very long before it just disappears. Hey, drew, hello.

Can I interrupt you for just one second? Sure. So you, having done a lot of investigation on these things, um, what's your read on Microsoft's idea behind that new quantum computer?

Because a million qubits sounds like a lot. So two, two things I wanna say. The, the first thing is, uh, I'll come back to that question, but I need to get something clear first.

Um, there are qubits that are physical, so atoms, or in Microsoft's case, it's a topology. Um, but, but there are the, these actual physical things you can get hold of that are not very, they're very noisy, they don't last very long. Um, and so that if you could stick with those, there's a limit to what you can do.

Um, however, there's been an absolutely dramatic disruptive, um, change in the industry in the last few years, uh, known as quantum error correction, which allows you to put lots of these physical qubits together to make much more reliable, more useful, logical qubits. So this logical qubit, think of it as a, as a, an array or a collection of physical qubits that is much more robust that you can do stuff with much more reliably great news because it makes quantum computers usable, but you need a lot more of them, I think a factor of a hundred or a thousand. So in other words, if I want, let's say 50 qubits to do some work, I'm probably gonna need 50,000 actual qubits to, you know, to represent those pure logic qubits.

That's, that's the first thing. But, so then coming back to the question on Microsoft, that they have been incredibly, um, courageous in, um, going down a different route. So most companies are looking at atoms and irons or photons, lots of photon quantum computers.

Like quantum would be an example. Yeah, Orca, another one. Um, Microsoft are looking at something very different in terms of these topological qubits, and I really admire that bravery.

Um, so, so you know, what, what can I say? Uh, I'm not a quantum computer expert and I would hate to kind of, um, make a, a judgment one way or the other. I, I really hope it works.

We all do. Um, and I think it would be incredible progress if, if you know it, but they haven't made one yet. So their idea and, and the scaling seems to make sense.

What they need to do now is actually manufacture some of these cubits and demonstrate them in, in the lab Following on Tom Ron Westfall, uh, RUM group. And naturally there's a lot of spotlighting on the QC threats. Sounds like, uh, there's plenty of runway for folks to take, you know, steps, best measures to prevent, uh, you know, a QC security breach.

And from your perspective, you know, what are, you know, the best steps, uh, the best, you know, approach to, you know, preventing, uh, you know, this type of, of threat from wreaking havoc. I, I'm gonna, I really don't want the whole 90 minutes for me to say, please wait until the next section, fair enough. Um, but I'm gonna, I'm gonna come back to all of these questions, um, because these are, these are exactly the right questions, and I'm really concerned with that question too.

There is a huge activity going on globally around ethics of quantum computers in the same way, same way that, uh, ethics of AI is probably being addressed. Maybe not that well, ethics of quantum computers is, is, is is more subtle. So it's, I've got a quantum computer that's incredibly powerful.

How do I stop someone bad using it? Secondly, if they use it, how do I even know what they've done? Because, um, in some ways of quantum computing, you can't know.

Um, because if, if you actually try to figure out what someone is doing with that quantum computer, it stops doing it. Um, so you can't look, and that, that is called blind quantum computing. Uh, it's a very, very much a, a top hot topic.

Now, what do you do? Do you police that? Do you stop people, um, programming your quantum computer to do whatever they want?

Um, how do you do that? So I'm gonna come back to that whole question later on. Um, so I'm not, I'm not parking it.

I will come back. Very good. Um, having said all of this, um, and talked about the, you know, the, the thrill and the excitement, uh, I don't want to spend the whole 90 minutes on quantum compete.

It's not my expertise. And what I really want to do is say, what does this mean for telecoms and how do we, can we take advantage of it? If I could jump in, Scott Roon, total network operations, and you may, you may also choose to defer or park this, but as we're at networking field day and the, the quantum communications topic you just raised, like one of the very interesting potential applications is how can I use quantum entanglement for zero latency communication and how does that bandwidth potentially scale with the number of qubits I have available?

So that's like, oh yeah, I think that's a very foundational question for us. But Let, let's deal with that one now, um, because you can't, uh, I'm gonna be quite categoric about this, and if someone wants to prove me otherwise, then they will change the world, but you can't. So, and, and my ex-boss, um, spent quite a lot of time trying to convince me to go and prove that you can do this.

Because imagine if you could have zero latency comms what that would do, now you can't. Um, so, so Einstein, you know, is safe, um, because although something weird is happening between these two entangled atoms, it's not communication. I was careful to say that.

I hope I was. So, so when I, I look at one atom and it affects another one somewhere else, maybe you've got the other one. I know that when mine is spinning down, yours is also spinning down.

I was careful to say that when I measured mine, it decided what it was. I, I couldn't dictate. So it, it was down because it was, uh, and another time I measured it'll be up and it's random.

So in other words, I can't use that instant weird entanglement to turn it into a comms link. I can't send information instantly because it is what it is. It doesn't give me, I can't manipulate it.

I can't say, can you please spin down because it won't, but say you can't use for instant communications. Very clarifying. Thank you.

It's unfortunate, but we get it. Bummer. Yeah.

Um, conclusion to section one, some discussion, although we've had some fantastic discussion already. Um, so I hope, you know, everyone agrees that this is potentially massive in terms of disruption. It's not here yet, but it's still, uh, I resisting to a presentation last month where a well-known quantum computer company said they can almost touch it.

A very emotive way of saying, we know how to get there. We are nearly there and it's within, um, what we will see though is not a kind of a single moment of supremacy. We'll see increasing numbers of useful problems being solved by quantum and it will just happen gradually.

Um, we are benefiting from vast amounts of funding. So that's, that's in its favor. You know, if it's gonna happen, it will happen because of the funding.

There are some side effects. These quantum computers are likely to consume huge amounts of energy and they'll, they will be hugely expensive. So, um, that's an issue, right?

So the question then is I could use it to help my optimization, but at a cost. And so I need to take the whole life cost into account there. Um, for example, do I want to optimize a portfolio, um, 2% better than I can with a classical computer, but at a cost of 5% more energy?

Uh, so these are the kinds of things I think are gonna, are gonna determine how these quantum computers are used. There are multiple ways of making them that we call them modalities. So there are at least 10, I can think of different flavors of a quantum computer, including the topological one for Microsoft.

Which one's gonna win? I don't think there will be a winner. I think, um, they'll all be useful for different types of problems.

So, so, um, in terms of backing, I think it's gonna be what, which of the problems that they solve do you think are gonna be really big, big ticket items? If you think new biology is gonna be enormous, you know, back back the modalities that are good at that, uh, if you think, um, I dunno, optimization of financial markets is, is big, going back to that one, I, I think we'll find different sweet spots. And then finally, uh, on this section, these do not replace classic computers.

Don't ask the quantum computers to add one, add one, gonna give you all kinds of numbers. Uh, that's not what it's good at. It's not there to do trivial or, or, or kind of more systematic things that a, that a classical computer does.

These two will be working together. We will see, uh, quantum and classical combined. And then, uh, just to tease a question, but we're gonna come back to this.

Um, who's gonna be using this? Who, who will be the people that take advantage of it? When I speak to government, what they would love is for this to be a quantum internet.

IE you at home can plug in and start doing stuff on a quantum computer like you do on the internet. Is that the case? Do we think that, um, or do we think the killer users might actually be, uh, universities who are all, you know, developing their quantum software groups already?

Quantum computer companies themselves. So having spent billions making quantum computers, probably want to use them to get some benefits. Um, companies with the domain expertise, their pharmaceuticals, financial companies, banks, um, biomedical, those sorts of companies are likely to be the ones that want to and, and can fund and buy in the expertise to make used to be quantum.

Do we honestly think that it will be anybody and it will be someone sitting in their bedroom, you know, that that comes up with the globally changing, uh, invention. I dunno, just an open question and I'm gonna pause for a second and then we'll move on to section two, but just, yeah, any more questions on that? Yeah, Andrew, uh, Jason Ner here.

Um, yeah, I had a question on, on which verticals do you think are, are, are interested right now? So who, are there certain verticals that are in early trials with quantum communi communications, uh, quantum encryption, that sort of thing that, that are, that are working with it now? Is there any specific ones that, that have more interest than others?

Yeah, in the next, um, section you'll hear all about that. Okay, Perfect. Um, but, but, um, but clearly banks, um, data center, cloud companies.

Um, but, but yeah, I'll talk about that next time. Perfect. Hey Andrew, anything else?

Uh, Brad, Gregory, with a quick question for you. Uh, see if they're aware, uh, you know, consume potentially vast amounts of energy in CapEx. Seems like we've got something doing that already, namely ai.

Uh, do you see, uh, less investment or there's only so much energy in CapEx to go around? How do you see AI potentially impacting investors and, and capital formation for this? Uh, is this an AI or a quantum question Or are you, so it's a quantum question because right now it seems like AI is chewing up all the, the energy and CapEx in the world, right?

So how do you see Yeah, go ahead. Sorry. I, I think, um, I expect, I hope that, um, when quantum computers start to scale up, they will be built in sensible parts of the world where their free energy, renewable energy, I, I, I actually don't see any other choice, um, because I don't know actually whether the consumption of energy is gonna be on the same scale as ai.

It could well be. Um, so hopefully there will be some, you know, common sense and that these things for them to be really, um, efficient will be cited in places where you've got, um, you know, solar energy or wind energy or something like that. But, but yeah, it's, it is a really real issue.

It's not being addressed enough. And in the end, you know, if you're trying to solve a problem which uses more energy than, than the benefit that you get, I think that's an issue.