The aim of this thesis is to develop sources of photonic entanglement to study both quantum networking tasks and some of the foundations of quantum physics. To this end, three high-performance sources are developed, each of them taking extensively advantage of standard telecom fibre optics components. The first source generates polarization entanglement via deterministic pair separation in two adjacent telecommunication channels. This source is naturally suitable for quantum cryptography in wavelength multiplexed network structures. The second source generates for the first time a cross time-bin entangled bi-photon state which allows for quantum key distribution tasks using only passive analyzers. The third source generates, with a record efficiency, polarization entanglement using an energy-time to polarization entanglement transcriber. The photon spectral bandwidth can be chosen over more than five orders of magnitude (25MHz - 4THz). This permits implementing the source into existing telecom networks, but also in advanced quantum relay and quantum memory applications. Moreover, this source is used to revisit Bohr's single-photon wave-particle complementarity notion via employing a Mach-Zehnder interferometer with an output quantum beam-splitter in a true superposition of being present and absent. Finally, to adapt the wavelength of the entangled telecom photon pairs to the absorption wavelength of current quantum memories, a coherent wavelength converter is presented and discussed.
