In November 2018, China completed a quantum communication trunk line connecting Wuhan and Hefei, spanning 609 kilometers with 11 relay stations at an estimated cost of 200 million yuan. The extension supplemented the existing Beijing-Shanghai quantum key distribution (QKD) backbone, which had been operational since September 2017.
The Shanghai-Hangzhou commercial link (260 km), opened in October 2017, had already established China’s first commercial quantum communication line. A Beijing-Guangzhou trunk received approval from the NDRC, with construction underway by 2019. These expansions built upon the 2,000-kilometer Beijing-Shanghai backbone linking four metropolitan quantum networks in Beijing, Jinan, Hefei, and Shanghai.
According to Post Quantum analysis, the Wuhan network included 71 nodes and was built by a subsidiary of China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation, a state-owned defense conglomerate.