Quantum communication infrastructure:
9 additional EU countries join the project

Background

During last Digital Assembly held in June, 7 EU Member States signed a declaration in which they commit to exploring -during the next 12 months- the possibility to develop and deploy within 10 years a quantum communication infrastructure in the EU. These Member States are Belgium, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands and Spain.

This quantum communication infrastructure will be used for data transit and storage in a highly secure way. It will ultimately link sensitive public and private communication assets all over the EU, such as banks and administrations.

This infrastructure will be composed of two components:  

1) an earth-based component will make use of existing fibre communication networks linking strategic sites and

2) a space-based component will enable coverage of long distances across the EU and other continents. The space-based component will be developed in cooperation with the European Space Agency.

In September, the Commission launched a call for tender for a study on the system architecture of the future infrastructure. The objective of the study is to define the user requirements and use cases that will drive the quantum communication infrastructure and specify the overarching system architecture. This call is closed by now.

Member States and industry committed to supporting the Quantum Communication Infrastructure (QCI)

In July, Hungary, Portugal and Poland signed the declaration, hence joining the initiative.

24 major European companies recently signed a white paper to express their strong support to the initiative.

On 3 December, 9 EU Member States signed the declaration on quantum communication infrastructure. These new signatories are Croatia, Cyprus, Greece, France, Lithuania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Sweden and Finland. Thierry Breton, Commissioner for Internal Market (and former Atos’ CEO), declared that this project is “critical for EU’s technological sovereignty and to the preparation of the next generation of communications security with quantum-safe encryption, building on quantum entanglement properties.”

A pilot project using Quantum Key Distribution (QKD)

The EU is already funding a pilot project on quantum communication infrastructure: OPENQKD, which aims to develop an experimental testbed using Quantum Key Distribution (QKD), an extremely secure form of encryption that has the potential to keep telecommunications, health care, electricity supplies and government services safe from cyber-attacks. Once the QCI is operational in Europe, QKD would be the first service to make use of it.

Next steps

Signatory countries must complete their preliminary work by the end of 2020.