indias first quantum secure communications link has become operational between sanchar bhawan department of telecommunications and the national informatics centre nics cgo complex in the national capital delhi said union minister of communications ashwini vaishnaw monday adding that is the next frontier of technology about seven months back we decided to put a challenge before the public and private sector and the first qkd quantum key distribution system standards were released and in that standard release system we decided that well do a pilot said vaishnaw at the first international quantum communication conclave organised by the telecommunication engineering center tec in collaboration with cdot tsdsi and ieee communications society delhi chapter the telecom minister said that a pilot was subsequently taken up between sanchar bhawan and the nic cgo office to assess the feasibility of deploying a quantum secure communication link between two points following this the first quantum secure communication link between sanchar bhawan and nic cgo complex is now operational he said at the conclave vaishnaw also announced a hackathon for the general public under which whoever is able to break the encryption of the system will stand a chance to receive rs 10 lakhsin the prime ministers vision of developing telecom technology standards and research protocols will take a very important place thats why one of the first things that we did was to set the tec on the path to developing the standards he said adding that the first set of quantum communications standards was released last year while the second set will be released today march 27vaishnaw said the unavailability of legacy systems allowed india to start developing an indigenous telecom stack from the scratch which he added would be in a sense technologically a step superior compared to what other systems are available when a typical new development is tested for about 100000 simultaneous connections we decided to test our system for 1 million simultaneous connections to begin with then we ramped it up to 5 million simultaneous connections and last december we tested it for 10 million simultaneous connections and the results have been heartening he observed vaishnaw said 1820 countries have expressed their interest in deploying the indigenous telecom stack there is a trust in the products which are coming from india people know that indias products would have been deployed and tested at scale he said that within 1516 months india has bagged 127 patents in the sixthgeneration or 6g technology despite some initial hiccups i really think that we can make a very big contribution to the development of 6g technologyfacebooktwitterlinkedinend of article10910131298799128