  Entangled coherent states can be prepared remotely by subtracting non-locally
a single photon from two quantum superpositions of coherent states, the
so-called "Schroedinger's cat" state. Such entanglement can further be
distributed over longer distances by successive entanglement swapping
operations using linear optics and photon-number resolving detectors. The aim
of this paper is to evaluate the performance of this approach to quantum
repeaters for long distance quantum communications. Despite many attractive
features at first sight, we show that, when using state-of-the-art photon
counters and quantum memories, they do not achieve higher entanglement
generation rates than repeaters based on single-photon entanglement. We discuss
potential developments which may take better advantage of the richness of
entanglement based on continuous variables, including in particular efficient
parity measurements.
