“Teleporting quantum information is now a practical reality,” asserts Deutsche Telekom. The firm’s T‑Labs used commercially available Qunnect hardware to demo quantum teleportation over 30km of live, commercial Berlin fiber, running alongside classical internet traffic. In an email to Tom’s Hardware, Deutsche Telekom’s PR folks said that Cisco also ran the same hardware and demo process to connect data centers in NYC.
So there’s a lot of incorrect assumptions and outright wrong ideas of how quantum entanglement is going to be used in a quantum network, or even a quantum Internet.
A hard rule: information cannot be sent faster than the speed of light.
When news articles try to summarize quantum teleportation, they incorrectly imply that information is being transmitted instantly. Quantum entanglement is not intended to send information. It’s meant to act like a hash or checksum. The magic in it is it enables both sender and receiver to know that their communication has been tampered with.
It has further use with encryption, but again, it’s to facilitate the encryption. The information is still being transmitted as light through the fiber network.
Quantum cryptosystems don’t move data faster than light but the payload is ‘teleported’ as in the data isn’t sent over the connection.
The entangled states are sent in such a way that when combined with previously transmitted qbits and sampled, the data appears at the receiving end without it ever going through the intermediary (a bit of handwavery because nobody actually understands quantum mechanics, especially physicists.
It is teleportation but not in a way that is FTL, all of the components of the data transmission obey the laws of physics… we just live in a world where the laws of physics allow for some weird and unintuitive shit.
You’re not wrong in that the connection’s security is absolute, any attempt by an attacker to read the data would disrupt the entangled states in unexpected ways which will result in an essentially random output. So if you’re getting data through the link then you know 100% that it is not being intercepted. It isn’t possible to copy quantum states for spooky physics reasons, so there is no such thing as a quantum wire tap.