News & Events
Meet the Partners: the 18 organisations building a secure, AI-native 6G
Eighteen partners. Nine countries. One question: what will it take to make 6G trustworthy by design?
Pioneering AI-enhanced SEcure 6G Services framework (PAISES – 6G) began on 1 June 2026 as a three-year Research and Innovation Action funded by the Smart Networks and Services Joint Undertaking (SNS JU) under Horizon Europe.
Coordinated by Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, the project brings together an €8.6 million consortium to answer a question the telecommunications sector can no longer defer: how do we build the next generation of mobile networks so that security, privacy and intelligence are designed in from the first line of code, rather than retrofitted after the first breach?
Today we are publishing a series of eighteen short videos, one for each partner in the consortium. In each, a lead representative introduces their organisation, explains the expertise they bring to PAISES-6G, and sets out what they hope the project will change.
We would encourage you to watch them. Not because eighteen videos is a tidy number, but because taken together they show something a project summary cannot: the sheer range of disciplines that a credible 6G security agenda now demands.
Why this consortium
Look at the composition of the group and a deliberate design becomes visible.
Two major European network operators — TIM and Telefónica — ensure that whatever PAISES-6G builds is measured against the realities of running a commercial network at scale, not against laboratory assumptions.
Seven SMEs carry a disproportionate share of the innovation. Small, specialised firms in Cyprus, France, Italy, Poland and the United Kingdom are typically the fastest route from a research result to a deployable product — and the most exposed if that route is blocked. Their presence is what turns research outputs into exploitable results.
Universities and research institutes in Spain, Italy, Germany and Ukraine supply the depth: federated learning, programmable data planes, game-theoretic intrusion detection, applied cryptography.
Dedicated security and quantum specialists address the threats that general-purpose network engineering tends to underestimate — from software protection and cryptographic key management to quantum key distribution over live metropolitan infrastructure.
An ethics, legal and socio-economic team is embedded in the technical work rather than bolted on at the end, assessing GDPR and AI Act compliance, environmental impact and social value as the technology is designed.
And crucially, the consortium arrives with a network of interconnected testbeds already in place — industrial 5G environments, network digital twin laboratories, quantum communication infrastructure, programmable 100 Gbps platforms, open-source core network deployments and beyond-5G IoT platforms — linked into a single distributed testbed. Ideas can be tested against real hardware from early in the project, not in its final months.
Nine countries, eighteen organisations, one shared conviction: that Europe should not have to choose between networks that are intelligent and networks that are trustworthy.