The European Union launched the €15 million Horizon 2020 project OPENQKD (Open European Quantum Key Distribution Testbed) in September 2019, with the AIT Austrian Institute of Technology serving as consortium coordinator. The three-year project brought together 38 partners from 13 European countries to build quantum key distribution (QKD) demonstrators and develop new secure communication applications.
OPENQKD’s activities covered testbed deployments in Austria, Spain, Poland, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, France, Italy, the United Kingdom, Greece, and the Czech Republic. According to AIT, the consortium included manufacturers, network operators, system integrators, small and medium-sized enterprises, research institutions, universities, and certification and standardization bodies.
Findings from OPENQKD were intended to feed directly into the broader European Quantum Communication Infrastructure (EuroQCI) initiative. Gernot Grimm, Head of Section III at the Austrian Federal Ministry of Transport, Innovation and Technology, said the project gave Austria “the opportunity to become an international technology supplier in a high-tech area of digitisation.”