The Hub has established the fibre-based UKQN, with metro-scale networks in Bristol and Cambridge and leveraging the UK National Dark Fibre Facility (NDFF) for connecting the two. The Hub is now pursuing further extension and evolution of the UKQN, exploration of new networking approaches, technology trials and demonstrations, and exploitation for user engagement. The focus is on architecture development and validation, creating reference architectures for both physical layer and flexible communication networks. In particular, we are creating an experimental testbed of an end-to-end, fully meshed and dynamically routed integrated classical and quantum network, comprising access-, core- and metro-networks.
