#quantuminternetalliance

Quantum Technology Initiative, CERN European business leaders and quantum technology researchers attended the late 2025 CERN Quantum Business Community Summit. To keep Europe competitive in cybersecurity, healthcare, and climate modelling, the summit linked academic research with commercial applications. An important innovation platform, CERN Quantum Technology Initiative encourages deep-tech enterprises and tool co-development. Participants said cutting-edge technology development demands a strong public-private cooperation. After the summit, CERN was highlighted as a prospective end user for quantum solutions and a technological testbed.

CERN's Innovation Platform

CERN is known as a “learning ground” for cutting-edge technologies as a QuIC affiliate. Thierry Botter, QuIC Executive Director, says “no better place than CERN to strike up delicate yet honest quantum conversations”. Co-development and technical advancement are promoted by CERN's Quantum Technology Initiative (QTI), a specialized innovation platform.

The meeting stressed CERN's end-user and testbed roles. According to Amanda Diez Fernández, who organises partnerships for the CERN Quantum Technology Initiative, the program intends to bring quantum computing applications and CERN's technical expertise to private firms.

Boosting Quantum Environment

The CERN Venture Connect initiative promotes deep-tech entrepreneurs to bridge the gap between lab research and commercial goods. Businesses can use CERN's cutting-edge technologies and a global investor network through this initiative. According to Kiutra co-founder Tomek Schulz, CERN plays a “crucial role in the creation and education of talent” and might buy the technologies these entrepreneurs create.

Europe First

Quantum technologies are a “top priority for the European Commission”. European Innovation Council member Gustav Kalbe expects it to become a major part of daily life, with purposes like: Climate simulation Cybersecurity Development of goods Healthcare and communication Recent advances like Geneva's first six-node quantum network and the Quantum Internet Alliance and EuroQCI were covered at the summit. These advances demonstrate the rapid evolution of secure communication towards a quantum internet.

Collaboration momentum

Experts agree that industry, politics, and science must work together to advance the subject as the International Year of Quantum ends. CERN's Business Development leader, Benjamin Frisch, said this kind of partnership is needed to advance quantum technology ethically and benefit society.

The Quantum Internet Application Challenge begins Round Three: Innovation accelerates the Entangled Future blueprint

The third annual Quantum Internet Application Challenge (QIAC) has accelerated the race to build a Quantum Internet (QI), a revolutionary network that uses quantum mechanics' unusual and powerful properties. The Quantum Internet Alliance (QIA), part of the EU's Quantum Flagship, opened 2025 registration on October 31, 2025. The Challenge invites global scholars, inventors, and students to propose quantum application prototypes.

More than a competition, this effort helps turn theoretical physics into practical technologies. By providing sophisticated modelling tools, the QIAC is crowdsourcing the "killer apps" that will define the earliest phases of this new network infrastructure. The quantum internet is open to new ideas and prototypes. Quantum entanglement must revolutionise sensing, processing, and communication in the entries. Innovators must submit ideas by December 21, 2025.

Software Foundation: Impossible Prototyping Use of SquidASM is crucial to the 2025 challenge. SquidASM is QIA's open-source quantum-network simulation framework. SquidASM, based on the sophisticated NetSquid network simulator, lets engineers test and execute complex quantum protocols before implementing a quantum internet. Participants can use the framework to test their apps in real life. Applications are evaluated against numerous quantum device and channel-specific noise models to illustrate technological challenges, specifications, and error-reduction tactics for forthcoming quantum hardware.

A powerful software stack is needed because quantum networks are governed by physics that differs from classical networks in superposition, entanglement, and the no-cloning theorem. In light of this new reality, programming must change. NetQASM is a low-level instruction set architecture utilised by SquidASM and NetSquid. The NetQASM interface allows hybrid quantum-classical programming, enabling remote entanglement, classical logic, and local quantum gates. These technological limits and the expensive cost of practical quantum gear would slow the field's advancement without this modelling capacity.

Quantum Internet Alliance Strategy The QIAC aims to create a cross-European Quantum Internet based on entanglement. The Quantum Internet (QI) should work with the classical internet when completely completed. It will use qubits to distribute entanglement across long distances, surpassing conventional networks.

QI development requires new network end nodes, quantum repeaters, and quantum memory. This new architecture's application layer must be investigated using the QIAC to ensure that the network is built with impactful, well-defined use cases.

The Challenge's ideas typically show where the quantum internet could make a difference, said Michele Amoretti, QIA Use Case Team Lead and Director of the University of Parma's Quantum Software Laboratory. These submissions can help it research and specify future quantum network uses. In his conclusion, the QIAC “is a way to bring fresh ideas into the heart of mission together they are shaping the use cases that will drive the global quantum internet of tomorrow.”

Applications Driving Round 3

Round 3 candidates should focus their prototypes on three basic quantum applications. Secure communication, distributed computation, and quantum sensing are the most revolutionary fields powered by entanglement-driven networking.

Quantum Distributed Computing

The Quantum Internet's Distributed Quantum Computing is intriguing. Quantum computers can only manage a few qubits, severely limiting their potential. To overcome this limitation, DQC combines numerous smaller quantum computers to construct a conceptually larger system.

These abilities depend on how successfully the quantum network distributes high-fidelity entangled qubit pairs to remote nodes. This enables quantum teleportation and gate teleportation to convey quantum states and activities over vast distances. The successful implementation of DQC can scale up computations for complex network optimisation problems or quantum simulation. QIAC participants must develop resource management and routing plans for this hybrid quantum-classical, multi-node environment.

Secure Advanced Communication

Despite Quantum Key Distribution (QKD), a well-known and commercially available approach that uses quantum mechanics to guarantee unconditionally safe key exchange, the Quantum Internet will enable more complicated protocols.

The 2025 challenge encourages unique applications beyond key exchange. Since it allows secure information transmission without pre-assigned keys, quantum secure direct communication (QSDC) is an important research topic. Healthcare, defence, and finance companies that handle sensitive data need this capacity to convey data in an impregnable method that detects eavesdropping quickly. It predicts that quantum networks would use these and other innovative cryptographic methods that use entanglement for physical-layer security.

Quantum Metrology and Sensing

Entanglement brings distant quantum systems together for distributed quantum sensing and metrology. This application employs a quantum network to link scattered quantum sensors for exact measurements that classical devices cannot match.

Sharing quantum states allows these networks to synchronise processes. A new navigation system needs ultra-precise distributed clocks, while upgraded battery technologies and material research need better magnetic field measurements. These submissions must leverage entanglement between distant nodes to get this crucial “quantum advantage” in synchronisation and measurement accuracy.

The Reward and Legacy

Innovative creativity has made the Quantum Internet Application Challenge famous. Italy's Claudio Cicconetti won the 2023 competition with his quantum-network benchmarking tools and a QuTech/Delft research tour. The highest award in 2024 went to Mexican Roberto Navarro for his work on “Graph State Generation,” which is crucial to multi-party quantum communication architecture. Both years' runners-up projects include quantum key distribution methods, quantum-based voting protocols, and network coordination algorithms, demonstrating the field's creativity.

The Quantum Internet Alliance is a major European effort developing an entanglement-based pan-European quantum internet. Building the first full-stack prototype quantum internet network and improving the European quantum internet ecosystem are its key goals. QIA aims to achieve previously unattainable capabilities through quantum communication by connecting quantum computers over long distances.

Quantum Internet Alliance founding and leadership

The Paris Centre for Quantum Computing, ICFO, the University of Innsbruck, QuTech (a partnership between TU Delft and TNO), and other renowned European researchers created QIA in 2017 to foster a sustained European partnership to develop the quantum internet globally For Europe to lead the second quantum revolution, the European Commission created the 10-year EU Quantum Technologies Flagship in 2018 with a 1 billion euro budget. QIA is part of it. Prof. Dr. Stephanie Wehner of QuTech directs the Quantum Internet Alliance, and QuTech is honoured to be its technical coordinator, coordinating outreach and projects.

Technology blueprint and prototype

QIA aims to provide a systematic “Blueprint” for a large-scale quantum internet based on a systems design methodology and deliberate component advances. This requires stretching the limits of technology in quantum repeaters (atomic gases, quantum dots, rare-earth-based memory) and quantum end nodes (trapped ion, diamond NV, and neutral atom qubits). The alliance seeks to achieve entanglement and teleportation over numerous distant quantum network nodes to move from point-to-point connections to multi-node networks by integrating these subsystems for the first time.

A prototype network with two quantum processor-based metropolitan-scale networks connected by a quantum repeater-based long-distance fibre backbone is the goal. Because it's completely programmable, this network can be utilised to construct many applications utilising platform-independent software. First phase of enormous project began in October 2022 and costs 24 million euros. The program lasts seven years.

Important innovations and developments

QIA has made remarkable strides; the Project Management Institute designated its H2020 FET-FLAGSHIP project (October 2018–March 2022) one of the world's top 5 most influential technology projects in 2021. Notable technological advances include:

Entanglement between diamond processors not directly coupled through a centre node in the first three-node quantum processor network.

The first quantum software and network stack were merged and tested on a multi-node network using QNodeOS, enabling platform-independent application creation.

An simple, cutting-edge quantum repeater link will enable long-distance quantum communication by announcing rare-earth ion quantum memory entanglement at telecom frequencies.

A discrete event simulator, NetSquid, was used to simulate and optimise quantum network needs on genuine fibre networks. Creating high-resolution FPGA-based time-to-digital converters (Swabian Instruments), an external cavity diode laser (TOPTICA), and a processed CVD diamond material (ElementSIX) for commercial use beyond quantum communication.

QIA also achieved record quantum memory efficiency in cold atom-based memories, a quantum logic gate between distant neutral atom nodes, and campus-wide Ion Trap processor entanglement.

Creating a Quantum Internet Ecosystem

Quantum Internet Alliance (QIA) promotes a creative European quantum internet environment beyond technical breakthroughs. This includes helping European startups like WeLinQ and Q*Bird launch QIA technologies. The alliance provides the community with the Quantum Network Explorer (QNE), a web platform for constructing application software on QIAs and other hardware platforms, and the Quantum Protocol Zoo, which comprises various application protocols.

QIA co-founded and leads the Quantum Internet Research Group within the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force), a leading classical networking standards group, to develop quantum internet standards. They work with CEN-CENELEC and other standardising bodies. The alliance aims to turn quantum internet technologies into industry-relevant use cases for finance and telecoms. QIA will provide open forums, workshops, and hackathons to promote this technology.

Cooperation and Future

QIA has 40 partners from nine countries, including academic institutions, telecom operators, system integrators, and quantum technology entrepreneurs. They believe a “team effort” is needed to establish the quantum internet and realise its benefits for society.