A Quantum-Entanglement Locality Area Network uses quantum entanglement to underwrite a conventional link, providing a shared timing reference and an uninterceptable key over unlimited distances. Entanglement carries no message of its own, communicating devices require access to a source of entangled Qubits and need to periodically measure them via Bell measurement, destroying the entanglement, and the data itself still crosses the Exonet at light speed. Due to the cost of producing and shipping Qubits QuanLan remains an expensive and rarely used medium except where synchronisation or secrecy is highly valuable.
Due to the mostly point to point nature of most QuanLan communications, the more advanced routing protocols used in InterMesh networks and the Exonet are replaced by a variant of Multiprotocol Label Switching. Each QuanLan device is assigned an id that represents its remote entangled particle(s), a routing table maintains a record of these ids to allow communication with multiple devices, and a link management protocol ensures their efficient use.
The common clock provided by QuanLan has effectively eliminated high frequency trading, and has resulted in several new doctrines in maneuver warfare, where a fleet under total jamming can still agree on timing. As the no-cloning theorem in quantum mechanics makes eavesdropping or data interception virtually impossible, there are many uses for QuanLan in defense, diplomacy, and banking. Entanglement shared between nodes is also consumed directly rather than as a link, allowing distributed sensing across baselines no single instrument can span, and some large analytic tasks to be run without any node holding the whole problem.