SK Telecom and Deutsche Telekom Launch Quantum Alliance for Secure Communications

SK Telecom of Korea and Deutsche Telekom announced at MWC 2017 that they have established the Quantum Alliance, designed to enable secure communication in the quantum computing era.

The companies noted that with industrial espionage and cyber-attacks a growing threat, plus the prospect in the near future that quantum computing could enable the cracking of existing encryption algorithms, today's common cryptography methods could become ineffective, meaning that server access, data links and documents, and the Internet as a whole, could be insecure and easily accessible.

In an effort to address this, SK Telecom and Deutsche Telekom have founded the Quantum Alliance, intended to ensure communications remain secure and with the primary objective of establishing the technical prerequisites for secure communications into the future. The partners believe that to achieve this network operators and hardware manufacturers will need to work together to define and implement common, global technical standards.

As a second step, the Quantum Alliance will seek to develop flexible services and security solutions that maintain secure communications. In the medium-term, the alliance has a target of developing, testing and delivering products that enable secure communications in the age of quantum computing.


As part of the initiative, SK Telecom and Deutsche Telekom are committed to recruiting partners for the alliance over the coming months, and plan to approach network operators, network equipment makers, device manufacturers and software vendors. Working with the new partners, the companies then plan to create a detailed action plan for how to proceed.

Recently, SK Telecom and Deutsche Telekom (DT), working with Ericsson, announced a joint demonstration of an intercontinental 5G trial network providing network slices in each operator's footprint covering South Korea and Germany. The demonstration was hosted at DT's corporate R&D centre in Bonn, Germany and the SK Telecom 5G Testbed at Yeongjong-do (BMW driving centre) in Korea, and followed the announcement of a collaboration on 5G at MWC Shanghai 2016.

The partners noted at the time that at MWC 2017 they would demonstrate the creation and management of federated network slices in a NS-as-a-Service (Network Slice as a Service) model.

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