NTT DOCOMO expands live use of D-Wave, cutting peak network signalling by 65%

[Zach]

NTT DOCOMO, Japan's biggest mobile operator, has expanded its production use of D-Wave's quantum technology. Quantum Zeitgeist's report is based on a D-Wave blog post. DOCOMO serves more than 93 million subscriptions across 250,000 base stations, so any efficiency gain matters at enormous scale

An earlier project used D-Wave's hybrid solver to regroup 270 base stations into 21 tracking area lists. That job used to take 27 hours and now takes 40 seconds. It cut peak paging signals by about 15 percent and gave an estimated 20 percent more capacity for connected devices

The new work goes further, tuning paging and location registration signalling together. It covers 333 base stations, three tracking area lists and nine tracking areas. The optimisation runs in about five minutes, where DOCOMO's classical methods could not meet production timeframes, and it cut daily peak location registration signals by 65.3 percent

DOCOMO also built a map tool so regional offices can review the proposed changes before they roll out. That is a smart practical touch, because network engineers need to trust a recommendation before putting it into a live system. Senior manager Hiroshi Kawakami and D-Wave chief executive Alan Baratz are both quoted

Real production deployments are rare in quantum computing, and this one has clear, measurable results. DOCOMO researcher Shuichi Fukuda will present the work at Qubits Asia in Seoul on 28 October. It is a good example of annealing finding a niche in telecoms optimisation

Is telecoms one of the best early markets for quantum optimisation? And does it matter whether a classical solver could eventually match these results?

DOCOMO Expands Production Use Of D-Wave Quantum Technologyquantumzeitgeist.com