According to TechWorld, a British Columbia based company, D-Wave, is intending to demonstrate quantum computing solving a real problem (and an NP-complete one at that) next week.

Twenty years before most scientists expected it, a commercial company has announceda quantum computer that promises to massively speed up searches and optimisation calculations.

D-Wave of British Columbia has promised to demonstrate a quantum computer next Tuesday, that can carry out 64,000 calculations simultaneously (in parallel "universes"), thanks to a new technique which rethinks the already-uncanny world of quantum computing. But the academic world is taking a wait-and-see approach.

Obviously there is bound to be a good deal of skepticism and the company website is rather bland at present - they say a new website will show up mid-Feb, i.e. after the demos.

The key I think is the NP-complete problem because, as you probably recall from your theoretical computer science lectures, once you can solve one NP-complete problem in polynomial time you can solve all of them and very many popular problems such as routing convergence algorithms, scheduling algorithms and so on turn out to be NP-complete. So if this works and if the cost can be reduced to some reasonable level (currently the process seems to involve very low temperatures) then we could well see a "quantum leap" in our computer knowledge. (more info in the extended entry)