Chennai: Consortiums of researchers from Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT-M), Society for Electronic Transactions Security (SETS) Chennai, C-DAC Bangalore and C-DAC Thiruvananthapuram in collaboration with National Informatics Centre (NIC) have initiated the field deployment of India’s first dedicated point to multi-point Metropolitan Area Quantum Access Network (MAQAN) at Chennai.
MAQAN is a research initiative led by Prof Anil Prabhakar from IIT-M, and funded by the Ministry of Electronics & Information technology.
The major outcome of this research collaboration is to build dedicated test bed for quantum access network, development of indigenous software and hardware components, creation of implementation standards and best practices.
Quantum communication takes advantage of the laws of quantum physics to provide unconditional data security. Quantum communications are now mature enough and ready to move from research laboratory to commercialisation.
Quantum networks scale the advantages of quantum key distribution protocols to more than two distant users.