D-Wave Quantum Inc. (NASDAQ: QBTS) and Japan’s largest mobile operator, NTT DOCOMO, have deployed a second quantum computing application in full production across DOCOMO’s live network operations.
The new application targets a core telecom challenge: optimizing tracking area lists, which group geographic zones within mobile networks to control how devices register their locations and receive incoming signals.
By refining how these tracking area lists are structured, the application reduced the daily peak volume of location registration signals by 65.3%, a significant cut in one of the most resource-intensive processes in mobile network management.
The deployment also reduced paging signals by 7.0%, a meaningful result given that location registration and paging signals typically move in opposite directions, making simultaneous reductions particularly difficult to achieve.
In a representative test spanning 333 base stations, three tracking area lists, and nine tracking areas, the system completed its full optimization run in approximately five minutes.
Those results have since been incorporated into DOCOMO’s network planning workflows and are actively shaping day-to-day operational decisions across the carrier’s infrastructure.
DOCOMO’s first D-Wave-powered production application focused on reducing paging signals within individual tracking areas, while this second application extends optimization across multiple tracking areas simultaneously, representing a broader and more complex challenge.
Dr. Alan Baratz, CEO of D-Wave, said: “DOCOMO is showing telecom operators around the world what production quantum adoption looks like: move beyond a single use case and apply the technology to distinct, increasingly complex operational challenges.”
Baratz added that telecom networks are “highly complex, resource-constrained environments,” and argued the results demonstrate how annealing quantum computing can deliver measurable performance improvements for operators today.
Hiroshi Kawakami, Senior Manager of Data Platform Department at NTT DOCOMO, said the application “balances two competing network requirements, significantly reducing location registration signaling while also lowering paging signals.”
Kawakami said the two production applications together demonstrate “how quantum computing can help us address multiple aspects of network optimization and use our infrastructure more efficiently.”
DOCOMO serves more than 93 million subscribers, making the scale of these network efficiency gains practically significant in terms of infrastructure load and operational costs.
D-Wave describes itself as the world’s first commercial supplier of quantum computers and the only company currently offering dual-platform quantum computing products spanning both annealing and gate-model technologies.
The company’s Leap quantum cloud service, which underpins deployments like DOCOMO’s, carries a stated availability and uptime rating of 99.9%, supporting enterprise-grade production use cases across commercial and government sectors.
