back to article South Korea plans large scale quantum cryptography adoption, thanks in part to tech partnership with USA

The Republic of Korea took two bold steps into the future on Tuesday, by announcing that the last of its 2G networks will go offline in June and that it will initiate large-scale adoption of communications protected by quantum encryption. The two announcements are unrelated. The quantum tests will build on demos conducted in …

  1. sreynolds

    Start off small.....

    I wouldn't be an early adopter for something that I cannot easily verify.

  2. b0llchit Silver badge
    Alert

    Upgrade or die

    ...and helping with device migration...

    The problem will be a large volume of "old" 2G modems that many systems have set up. Here in Europe, the problem may be significantly larger than in South Korea, but I guess that quite a bit of remote equipment will go silent when the 2G net is switched off.

    Migrating old equipment may not be an option and would then need to be replaced. But, replacement may prove very difficult, considering that some of this stuff may be 15+ years old and have no "modern" equivalent and most likely no support contracts.

    With the accelerated changes in standards during the last 25 or so years, it has become clear that (planned) obsolescence is a much bigger problem. Sure, products are designed to fail fast, but when the standards chance rapidly, then you are forced to change more often than you'd like. As an example, we went through several digital television standards in very short time and created lots of expensive paperweight in that process. Yes, it is expensive to maintain "old" tech like 2G, but sometimes when it just works, why do you need to change it? Well you might want to change it, but please, also make me a dumb-phone again that will work on a 4G network.

    1. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

      Re: Upgrade or die

      On the other hand it's a good way to discover all that old monitoring kit you have forgotten about and don't know you were depending on

  3. Pascal Monett Silver badge
    WTF?

    Nationwide quantum encryption ?

    I thought that quantum tech was still in labs. How is it that, all of a sudden, we have industrial technology ready and waiting to be installed ?

    I must have missed the announcement from Intel, AMD or TSMC that they were starting production of quantum chips.

  4. This post has been deleted by its author

POST COMMENT House rules

Not a member of The Register? Create a new account here.

  • Enter your comment

  • Add an icon

Anonymous cowards cannot choose their icon

Other stories you might like