Quantum Networking, Quantum Security

Budapest hosts Central European Quantum Communication Infrastructure workshop

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November 13, 2026 by Ivy Delaney

Beginning on November 4, 2026, the Budapest University of Technology and Economics (BME) hosted the CEQCI Workshop 2026, uniting partners from the Central European Quantum Communication Infrastructure (CEQCI) project with representatives from other EuroQCI initiatives and the academic community. The workshop served as a forum to review project progress and address the technical and organizational challenges of building an interconnected quantum communication infrastructure across Central Europe.

Participants examined how to combine terrestrial fibre-optic links with satellite communication, aiming to connect Vienna, Bratislava, Budapest and Bucharest. The subsequent CEQCI session brought together representatives of the participating countries, Austria, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia, who presented the project’s individual components, current developments and implementation plans.

CEQCI Project: Connecting Vienna, Bratislava, Budapest, and Bucharest via QKD

Representatives from Austria, Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia detailed current developments aimed at establishing a quantum key distribution (QKD) network linking Vienna, Bratislava, Budapest and Bucharest, with planned expansion to Innsbruck and Graz. The workshop’s program included a presentation of PETRUS, delivered by Stephan Laschet and Cristina Tamas from the Austrian Institute of Technology (AIT), outlining its role in coordinating cooperation within the broader European Quantum Communication Infrastructure ecosystem, CEQCI says.

PETRUS will support the exchange of knowledge and experience between projects, encouraging collaboration across the continent. The consortium also contributed to the EuroQCI Proof of Concept policy paper and participated in Days 2026 in Padova. Discussions at the Budapest workshop addressed challenges to CEQCI’s implementation, including securing co-funding and managing highly classified project information. Participants also focused on preparing the infrastructure for future connection to the Eagle-1 satellite, an important step toward a hybrid terrestrial-satellite quantum communication system.

The in-person meeting provided a vital opportunity for partners to coordinate activities and exchange updates, accelerating progress on the ambitious project. The CEQCI project’s scope extends beyond simply establishing a functional QKD network. It actively contributes to policy development within the EuroQCI framework.

PETRUS Coordination Supports European Quantum Communication Infrastructure Ecosystem

Stephan Laschet and Cristina Tamas of AIT presented PETRUS’s framework for supporting coordination, a key element in the ambitious project to interconnect quantum communication networks across Central Europe. This presentation followed opening remarks from Eszter Udvary, Vice Dean of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Informatics at BME, and László Bacsárdi, CEQCI Project Coordinator, setting the stage for discussions on practical implementation. The workshop’s focus extended beyond simply establishing a functional quantum key distribution (QKD) network; participants examined how to integrate terrestrial fibre-optic links with a satellite-based quantum communication segment using the European Eagle-1 satellite.

An important component of this architecture is the optical ground station (OGS) in Innsbruck, delivered through QCI activities, intended to provide Austria’s connection to the satellite network. Complementing this, the ground station in Budapest will enable quantum key exchange between terrestrial and space-based infrastructure, creating a hybrid system for secure communication.

The integration of these elements represents a step towards a pan-European quantum network capable of transmitting information with high security. Discussions also brought together representatives from IberianQCI, SEEWQCI and CEQCI to explore strategies for effective stakeholder engagement, identifying viable applications for quantum communication technologies, and defining practical use cases, according to the company. Samuel Klement of the Slovak Academy of Sciences participated in a panel focused on software layers and key management, contributing to the conversation surrounding interoperability requirements essential for connecting disparate QKD networks into a cohesive European infrastructure.

The panel addressed the challenges of creating a unified system from individual networks, emphasizing the need for standardized protocols and secure key distribution methods. The CEQCI Workshop 2026 in Budapest demonstrated that quantum communication is no longer a distant prospect but a developing infrastructure built on ongoing technological advancements and the collaborative spirit of research institutions and industry partners throughout Europe.

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Ivy Delaney

Ivy Delaney has been working with neural networks and machine learning since the mid-nineties, back when a couple of hidden layers and a long afternoon of training counted as ambitious. She has watched the field go from academic curiosity to the thing quietly running underneath everything, and she brings that long view to quantum computing. For Quantum Zeitgeist she covers the ground where the two fields meet. That means quantum machine learning and the variational algorithms it leans on, and it also means the less glamorous but more interesting story of classical machine learning already doing real work inside quantum machines, decoding error-correcting codes, calibrating noisy hardware and learning the error models that simulators depend on. She writes about the hardware those algorithms have to run on too, and about the post-quantum cryptography scramble that the same hardware has set off. Her stories typically start with the paper, whether that is peer-reviewed work, conference proceedings or an arXiv preprint, with the source linked so you can hold a claim up against the research it came from. She is unimpressed by benchmarks that will not say what they beat, and by demonstrations that only work in the press release.

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