Quantum Technology, Quantum Networks

Germany Plans Fiber Network to Strengthen Quantum Connections

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July 28, 2026 by Ivy Delaney

Germany is planning a nationwide fiber network designed to advance both quantum technologies and precision metrology. The proposed infrastructure, dubbed the QFT-backbone, will support research ranging from fundamental physics to experiments under realistic field conditions, enabling the development and testing of emerging quantum systems. Klaus Blaum, Director at the Max-Planck-Institut für Kernphysik, was a key initiator of the QFT-backbone proposal, demonstrating leadership from a prominent research institution in driving this national infrastructure project. Researchers envision the network complementing existing European initiatives and strengthening Germany’s position in a field demanding increasingly sophisticated measurement capabilities; they hope the proposal will stimulate further discussion on establishing this research infrastructure in Germany.

The QFT-backbone will complement existing European initiatives and solidify Germany’s position in these critical fields, offering a sustainable platform for the growing quantum technology community. The full proposal appears in The European Physical Journal Special Topics.

Germany’s longstanding expertise in time and frequency dissemination underpins the ambitious QFT-backbone proposal, a nationwide optical fiber infrastructure designed to support both fundamental and applied research. This network will move beyond laboratory settings, enabling experiments under realistic field conditions and fostering the development of practical quantum technologies. The proposed QFT-backbone focuses not solely on quantum computing, but also addresses the growing needs of the German quantum technology community in the related field of precision metrology. Researchers envision this infrastructure strengthening Germany’s position in both areas and building upon years of collaboration between academic, research, and industrial partners.

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Avatar of Ivy Delaney

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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