  Quantum repeaters hold the promise to prevent the photon losses in
communication channels. Most recently, the serious efforts have been applied to
achieve scalable distribution of entanglement over long distances. However, the
probabilistic nature of entanglement generation and realistic quantum memory
storage times make the implementation of quantum repeaters an outstanding
experimental challenge. We propose a quantum repeater protocol based on the
deterministic storage of a single photon in atomic ensembles confined in
distant high-finesse cavities and show that this system is capable of
distributing the entanglement over long distances with a much higher rate as
compared to previous protocols, thereby alleviating the limitations on the
quantum memory lifetime by several orders of magnitude. Our scheme is robust
with respect to phase fluctuations in the quantum channel, while the fidelity
imperfection is fixed and negligibly small at each step of entanglement
swapping.
