  Building a quantum internet requires efficient and reliable quantum hardware,
from photonic sources to quantum repeaters and detectors, ideally operating at
telecommunication wavelengths. Thanks to their high brightness and
single-photon purity, quantum dot (QD) sources hold the promise to achieve high
communication rates for quantum-secured network applications. Furthermore, it
was recently shown that excitation schemes, such as longitudinal acoustic
phonon-assisted (LA) pumping, provide security benefits by scrambling the
coherence between the emitted photon-number states. In this work, we
investigate further advantages of LA-pumped quantum dots with emission in the
telecom C-band as a core hardware component of the quantum internet. We
experimentally demonstrate how varying the pump energy and spectral detuning
with respect to the excitonic transition can improve quantum-secured
communication rates and provide stable emission statistics regardless of
network-environment fluctuations. These findings have significant implications
for general implementations of QD single-photon sources in practical quantum
communication networks.
