Why Quantum matters now

Extremely busy days at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona last week. A great presentation about ‘Leveraging quantum performance for telcos today” has been given by Dr. Richard Weller and Reiner Hogen.

Actually, it has been emphasized that though there is still some way to go until quantum computing can tackle industry-relevant challenges, enterprises (and of course especially telcos) need to act now. Quantum computing holds the promise to enable ground-breaking applications with major impact for many industries.

Reiner then gave a great example of Automatic Cell Planning. Antenna cell towers need optimal placement and configuration to improve service quality and coverage for end users. That’s a highly complex and challenging optimization problem as you want to minimize investment whilst maximizing coverage. Quantum Inspired Optimization (the use of computational methods inspired by the principles of quantum mechanics) can already outperform today the established approach of a tier-1 Telco. For a real-world scenario,  it has been 37-times faster and delivered a better solution quality in addition.