Fourth Call for CEF-Digital: a total of 85 proposals submitted

Connecting Europe Facility - Digital Call 4 closed on 13 February with a budget of €233 million for 5G Large-Scale Pilots and Backbone connectivity for Digital Global Gateways. It drew an impressive total of 321 partners responding with 85 proposals. These submissions featured coordinators from 22 different countries and included various consortia, reflecting a diverse and collaborative effort to bolster Europe's digital infrastructure. 

Applicants interested in applying for the EuroQCI initiative can refine their application until 27 March 2025.  

The distribution of applications per topic is as follows:   

• Backbone connectivity for Digital Global Gateways – works: 37 
• Backbone connectivity for Digital Global Gateways – studies: 9 
• 5G Large-Scale pilots – 5G coverage along transport corridors – works: 11 
• 5G Large-Scale pilots – 5G and Edge for Smart Communities – works: 28 

The evaluations by a panel of independent experts and the European Commission will take place until the end of summer when the selection of awardees will be announced.  

Seal of Excellence  

CEF-Digital is one of the programmes that awards the Seal of Excellence. 

The Seal of Excellence awards proposals that were assessed under CEF-Digital calls’ evaluations and complied with the minimum quality requirements, but which could not be financed due to budgetary constraints. 

Background information 

Discover the projects awarded in the first, second and third calls of CEF-Digital on the Funding & Tenders portal. 

The Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) Digital programme leverages projects of common European interest deploying secure, resilient and high-capacity backbone infrastructures. It also supports the deployment of large-scale 5G standalone networks, including their integration with edge computing capacities that meet the very stringent requirements of innovative use cases in terms of very-high reliability, security, low latency, communication symmetry, and high throughput.