Korea revokes approvals for 1,700 communication equipment, devices
koreaherald.com
koreaherald.com
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.
https://hackaday.com/2021/06/19/1700-regulatory-approvals-re...
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?
If it was an individual with limited resources or no official internet presence, or specific circumstances it would be a different matter of course.
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.
Hmm, what makes you think that? I didn't see any indication in the article that the Chinese branch was not testing to the standards of US certification.
They were not. Not even "kind of". For them to be fake they'd need to be made out as something they are not[1]. The companies who acquired those certificates just weren't aware that certificates from that particular branch weren't permissible under SK rules - likely not even authorities in SK were aware until they had a closer look.
As an analogy, a driver's license from one country may not allow you to drive a car in another, but that doesn't mean it's a fake license.
[1] Edit: Some outlets claim there were fabricated test records, if that is true and not just journalists writing whatever, then they would be indeed fake.
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.
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.
"Korea only acknowledges test results from the US-based BACL through an agreement with the United States, and does not recognize tests by the organization’s Chinese offices, the ministry said."
I imagine they were told to do this as part of US CN trade disagreements.
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.
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 there’s 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 it’s several orders of magnitude less authoritarian and abusive compared to the north, and perhaps it’s even warranted as a bulwark against pro-north sentiment in the south. But it is what it is.
And it’s abundantly clear from context which one this deBACL involves.