A quantum game of telephone

Characterizing multinode quantum networks without ubiquitous local entanglement sources presents significant experimental challenges. We introduce ``quantum telephone,'' an iterative ancilla-assisted process tomography protocol that leverages intermediate detection events, effectively treating previously probed links as ancillae for subsequent links. Implemented on a deployed multinode fiber network, we observe noisy intermediate channels create fundamental parameter degeneracies that compound inference errors under sequential estimation. Counterintuitively, the inclusion of downstream near-unitary channels provides boundary constraints that, when used in tandem with global inference, can resolve ambiguity in channels earlier in the sequence. By compensating for localized information loss, this approach obviates the strict full-rank requirements of standard ancilla-assisted process tomography, even when intermediate states become completely depolarized. Overall, quantum telephone offers a hardware-efficient and information-maximizing path toward characterizing complex quantum networks with limited resources.