This will be about the traceability of the approval.
The standards and procedures used by an accredited lab are calibrated against a chain of standards that can ultimately be traced back to the body that maintains national measurement standards (eg. NIST in the US), thus guaranteeing the accuracy of the measurement Various countries, such as Korea and the US, have certified each other's standards, providing traceability between countries.
In this case, the measurements performed by the lab located in China can't be traced to a standard recognised by Korea. This is important, as the whole object of the lab accreditation process is to provide traceability to the primary standard.
There's not much option here apart from repeating the measurements in a traceable way, as one can't retrospectively make a measurement traceable. It could be argued that it's not so much a case of revoking an approval, but that due to the lack of traceability the approval never existed in the first place.
Hackaday has a good writeup on the subject.
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/19/1700-regulatory-approvals-re...
Pretty shoddy journalism to not reach out to BACL for comments. Sounds like theyâre just toeing the party line. Maybe BACL really are total scumbags, but I still want to hear both sides of the story.
Maybe the only way to get some useful insight is if there was litigation. Do the MRAs actually specify where the physical testing happens, or is it just about where the legal responsibility falls? Does it matter if the cable to the spectrum analyser is 5 m or 11,000 km long?
I feel in this day and age the BACL doesnât have to respond to individual journalists on every case and could just publish a statement if they feel the need to clarify anything.
If it was an individual with limited resources or no official internet presence, or specific circumstances it would be a different matter of course.
Summary: >Korea only acknowledges test results from the US-based BACL through an agreement with the United States
It's interesting though how come the certs were fake ones. Is it possible the US lab outsourced the whole process?
It's in the article, the revoked approvals were not for 'fake' certificates, they were for valid certs from Chinese Bay Area Compliance Laboratories(BACL) offices.
It's unclear the cause of this, one might infer it was US pressure to adhere to the agreement after finding non-compliance, alternatively it could be internally originated investigation.
The reports were claimed to be from the US office but the the testing was done in China. So they were a kind of fake.
Not even that, the certs where from California offices, just that the testing work was carried out in a China branch office.
IMO this is a somewhat grey area. Not familiar with regulations around testing labs, but om the surface looks like an innocent cost optimization that someone decided to put some pressure on.
Yes, read TFA
Is it a monopoly in certification? Can South Korea certificate its own equipments?
Korea can accept whatever certifications it wants. This is Korea refusing to accept the test results performed at the China offices of a US company.
"Korea only acknowledges test results from the US-based BACL through an agreement with the United States, and does not recognize tests by the organizationâs Chinese offices, the ministry said."
The language is a bit misleading.
Korea acknowledges test results from dozens of domestic and foreign labs. Labs already certified by the US, Canada, or EU are covered by a blanket agreement with the respective jurisdictions, and BACL is one of them. This helps reduce friction when importing/exporting from/to these regions. But the blanket agreement doesn't cover China-based subsidiaries of US-based labs.
It's most likely much cheaper for companies to certify once for US+Korea than to have to do so separately for US and Korea. Given that Korea is a smaller nation it's a win for them in terms of imports.
Ensures continuous access to US FCC mandated obligations for trans-national imports of Chinese and other manufactured goods. Ie, exports from KR and export of services delivered over technology.
I imagine they were told to do this as part of US CN trade disagreements.
Here's a link to a site covering this that also has HTTPS https://hackaday.com/2021/06/19/1700-regulatory-approvals-re...
Is there a list of affected products?
"Korea" =/= "South Korea".
Funny enough, most people that I have met so far that either were from South Korea or had family ties there simply referred to it as "Korea" (when talking English or German to me, obviously).
I too attended high school geography class, so I know that there are actually two of them. In fact, I initially bothered to explicitly call it "South Korea", but fairly quickly ran into someone who actually took offense in that.
Not sure if that was an outlier or a general thing. Considering that this is an English translation of a [South] Korean news site, I tend towards the later.
Obviously, but when youâre in either one of them, as far as youâre concerned the one youâre in is Real Korea and the other one is Fake Korea.
Westerners, especially the ones invested in ensuring the security of the south against the north, like to think otherwise, but even the south is pretty authoritarian. On the same site thereâs a piece about the foreign ministry wanting to spend police resources going after some prankster who swapped satellite image of Seoul with Pyongyang[1].
Of course it needs to be said that itâs several orders of magnitude less authoritarian and abusive compared to the north, and perhaps itâs even warranted as a bulwark against pro-north sentiment in the south. But it is what it is.
They are both Korea. Is that so hard to grasp?
Of course they are, but ask either authority about communications equipment approval and youâll get radically different answers.
And itâs abundantly clear from context which one this deBACL involves.
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