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Tag: KT

  • KT Links 5G Network and Satellite, Transferring Data Between Them

    KT Links 5G Network and Satellite, Transferring Data Between Them

    ZDNet is reporting that KT, South Korea’s largest telephone company, has announced the successful transfer of data between their 5G network and a satellite 36,000 kilometers away.

    The news has huge implications for wireless carriers around the world, as many struggle to deploy 5G networks in rural areas.

    According to ZDNet, “KT will also be able to use the satellite as a back-haul when transferring media files to multiple devices simultaneously, and will also allow the carrier to provide more stable 5G services by grouping its network with the satellite.

    “KT said it has developed a hybrid router for the test, and performed HD streaming from its 5G network and satellite to multiple 5G handsets for the test.”

    KT plans on submitting the test results to the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) sometime next year. 3GPP is the organization that develops protocol standards for wireless technology and KT hopes their results will contribute to the 5G-satellite standard.

    Should it become widely adopted, the technology will assist countries with limited infrastructure to successfully roll out 5G. Even countries with large scale rollouts could still use the technology to cover remote areas where millimeter wave (mmWave) 5G is not feasible, due to its limited range.

  • Korean Subcontractors Arrested for Selling Data

    Five men working as subcontractors for South Korea’s two largest mobile providers have been arrested for illegally acquiring and selling personal information and location data from likely hundreds of thousands mobile users.

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    The men, who were doing online field tracking services for SK Telecom and KT, developed software that would secretly log the user data, and then turn around and sell it to private investigators for about 300,000 won ($263) a pop. The private detectives likewise turned around and sold the data to individual clients, in about 200,000 cases. The private eyes were selling the data packets for roughly 500,000 won ($439). Police arrested data thieves, a private detective agency owner and a data broker.

    A South Korean police official was quoted as saying, “the program had been used for commercial reasons for three months since August last year. But it is assumed that not all the tracking cases were tracked in violation of the law. We plan to further expand related investigations because we have found that as many as 1,000 clients requested information tracking and the destinations of the leaked information have not been disclosed.”

    KT and ST Telecom both claim to have known nothing of the data theft until the arrests were made. The case echoes the incident at T-Mobile in 2009, where employees were caught selling customer data to competitors. There’s only so much a company can do to screen its employees, especially those who are subcontracted. Or, one can just be like Facebook, and not screen outsourced workers at all.