Teleportation can also securely transmit quantum information even when Alice does not know where Bob is. Bob can take his entangled particle wherever he pleases, and Alice can broadcast her instructions for how to ungarble the teleported state over whatever conventional channels — radio waves, the Internet — she pleases. That information would be useless to an eavesdropper without an entangled link to Alice.
This is very neat from a purely scientific perspective. It seems pointless and misleading to try to present it as having direct practical value.
If I had a buck for every time this was said about a scientific discovery, I would be quite well off...
For a 'regular' one time pad this is not the case. Someone could have copied it and both Alice and Bob would be none the wiser until it's too late.
One-time pad based encryption schemes are theoretically unbreakable - one of the things (the thing?) holding back wide spread adoption is the difficulty of proper key management. This has the potential to solve that issue.
* underground/underwater communication systems where wires and radio waves faulter
* interstellar communication without antennae and without bouncing the signal off satellites
* radiowave-less espionage
* etc?
Despite knowing close to nothing about this field, I'd hope that error-correction code would be somewhat simpler, resulting in less padding and more data going through. Think about the problems with dial-up telephones alone, lots of noisy lines and so you have to pad the data with enough error detection that it's still recoverable at the other end of the line.
It's been nearly two decades since I last studied this, but something about parity check matrices is screaming away in my head. Could be very wrong about that though.
Of course you have to have already prepared and sent the same amount of qbits... maybe sending qbits "as needed" is harder than sending them in bulk in advance?