Prague, October 2026. i46 is proud to announce that our joint proposal with Rinicom Ltd (UK), QUANTUM-RESILIENT 5G, has been selected for funding under the first Open Call of the COP-PILOT Horizon Europe project. Over the next 8 months, i46 (coordinator) and Rinicom will bring secure, quantum-resilient private-5G connectivity into one of the hardest connectivity environments there is: underground mining operations.

What is COP-PILOT?

COP-PILOT (Collaborative Open Platform for an Intelligent, Trustworthy, Secure and Sustainable Meta-Operating System) is a Horizon Europe Innovation Action building a next-generation open platform for the IoT-Edge-Cloud continuum. Its first Open Call funded a small number of third-party projects to demonstrate the platform against real-world industrial challenges across mining, manufacturing, agri-food and smart cities. QUANTUM-RESILIENT 5G is one of the Cluster 1 (Mining) selections.

What QUANTUM-RESILIENT 5G will deliver

Underground mines are structural dead-zones for connectivity. Public cellular networks do not reach below ground, and fibre backbones usually stop at main haulageways. The digital workflows the sector most needs : predictive maintenance, autonomous and remotely-operated equipment, real-time seismic safety, ore-flow analytics, and regulatory telemetry for the Critical Raw Materials Act and the Cyber Resilience Act : all stall at the tunnel entrance.

Our project will deliver a turnkey, secure connectivity stack, purpose-built for underground operations and natively integrated with the COP-PILOT platform. The system will have three defining ingredients:

  • A private 5G Standalone core, developed by i46, which will run on a surface Ground Station.
  • A quantum-resilient authentication engine (i46's QRNG-derived one-time-password mechanism), which will protect every control-plane and critical data-plane message across the air interface.
  • A leaky-cable radiating distribution, developed by Rinicom, which will deliver 5G coverage along kilometres of tunnel without active infrastructure underground.

The Ground Station will register as a COP-PILOT Domain under GitOps, and will interoperate with the platform's open orchestration layer (ColonyOS, ColonyFS, Arrowhead) and its four mandatory components (LLM-UI, ESO, SLA assurance, SIF).

Validation path

Over 8 months we will take the system from TRL 5 to TRL 7 across two sites:

  • RISE ICE Datacenter (Luleå, Sweden) : integration and validation against the COP-PILOT platform.
  • Holman Test Mine (Cornwall, UK) : field demonstration in a working underground environment, where Rinicom has already permanently installed 200 m of leaky cable, the VisualFusion+ control-room system and a tunnel-mounted robotic arm.

The field pilot will support all four COP-PILOT Cluster 1 use cases: RockSigma seismic monitoring, ThingWave smart rock-bolts, Hosch and Predge conveyor predictive maintenance, and the IoT-Edge-Cloud testbed.

Why it matters

QUANTUM-RESILIENT 5G is a direct extension of DARK-5G, the project i46 and Rinicom delivered under the FIDAL Open Call, which reached TRL 7 in underground conditions. Where DARK-5G proved that private 5G can live underground, QUANTUM-RESILIENT 5G will prove that it can do so securely, under a quantum-resilient trust model, and as a native citizen of a European open meta-OS.

Two of the outputs are designed to outlive the project and travel beyond mining:

  1. A ColonyOS-coupled 5G-domain telemetry pattern that will let the COP-PILOT platform make workload-placement decisions based on live radio-network conditions. This is a feedback loop classical telco automation frameworks (ONAP, ETSI ZSM, O-RAN) do not provide.
  2. An extreme-edge connectivity-domain blueprint that will extend the COP-PILOT Domain model into security-restricted, intermittently-connected environments.

Both will be contributed upstream to the COP-PILOT platform and will be reusable across Clusters 2, 3e and 3a.

Commercial outcome

The integrated stack will become the Mining Connectivity Pack, jointly offered by i46 and Rinicom. The Holman installation will remain in place beyond project end as a live commercial reference deployment.

Partners

  • i46 s.r.o. (Prague, Czech Republic, coordinator) : quantum-secure communications and Cyber Resilience Act compliance for industrial and critical-infrastructure operators.
  • Rinicom Ltd (Lancaster, United Kingdom) : secure-communications SME with 30+ years of secure-RF experience, including the Piccadilly-Line train-to-platform system for London Underground.

What's next

The project has now officially kicked off. Follow progress on our website and through the COP-PILOT community channels. All integration source code will be released on GitHub under Apache 2.0 and validation datasets on Zenodo under CC-BY 4.0, with a dedicated session planned at the MINEX Europe Mining and Exploration Forum.

QUANTUM-RESILIENT 5G is funded by the European Union under the Horizon Europe programme (COP-PILOT, Grant Agreement No. 101189771). Views and opinions expressed are those of the authors only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union.