Q&A with computer scientist Stephanie Wehner, who is leading the Quantum Internet Alliance, an EU effort to build a network for transmitting quantum information
The first data ever transmitted over Arpanet, the precursor of the internet, blipped from a computer at the University of California … Tweets: @sustainhistory , @nattyover , @yale_qi , and @quantamagazine Tweets: Nayef Al-Rodhan / @sustainhistory : To Invent a Quantum Internet Fifty years after the current internet was born, the physicist and computer scientist Stephanie Wehner is planning and designing the next internet — a quantum one. https://www.quantamagazine.org/ ... via @QuantaMagazine Natalie Wolchover / @nattyover : I interviewed Stephanie Wehner, a leader of the effort to develop the quantum internet, about why we might want such a thing. https://www.quantamagazine.org/ ... YaleQuantumInstitute / @yale_qi : “I also think that using such a network, we gain information about creativity and social sciences — about how, in fact, people will go and use these networks.” https://www.quantamagazine.org/ ... Quanta / @quantamagazine : “There's sometimes a judgment in the sciences that some questions are fundamental and some questions are mundane. I think bringing something into the real world that people can actually use is never mundane.” https://www.quantamagazine.org/ ...
Context & Ripple Effects
Stephanie Wehner's interview lands a year into the Quantum Internet Alliance's mandate and builds directly on her own lab's track record: QuTech's plan for a secure four-city quantum network was the proof-of-concept that gave Brussels confidence to fund an alliance around her. The framing in the piece — fifty years after Arpanet's first transmission — positions this as infrastructure design, not just physics.
First-order effects
- Wehner's team now sets the de facto technical agenda for EU quantum networking, translating the four-city QuTech demo into an alliance-wide roadmap for transmitting quantum information between nodes.
Second-order effects
- The US response within a year — officials unveiling their own plan for a quantum internet running alongside the classical one — turns what was a Dutch national project into an explicit transatlantic race for network standards and talent.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, quantum networking becomes a state-funded infrastructure layer like the early internet itself, with the machine builders covered in the IBM-Google-Microsoft quantum computing race supplying endpoints whose value depends on which network architecture wins.
The trend: Governments are funding parallel quantum networks as strategic infrastructure, with the EU's alliance model and the US program now competing to define the stack.