Post-quantum readiness for mobile networks
Crypto-agility for 5G Standalone and Open RAN
Mobile networks run on cryptography that a cryptographically relevant quantum computer would break. Thames Smart Tech helps operators and vendors establish exactly what they are running today, what has to change, and what that change will cost — while there is still time to plan it rather than rush it.
The deadlines are not hypothetical
The United Kingdom has published dates. The National Cyber Security Centre's migration timeline sets three fixed milestones.
For mobile networks the sector guidance already exists alongside it. GSMA PQ.03, Post Quantum Cryptography — Guidelines for Telecom Use Cases, sets out a phased, prioritised approach for operators. In the O‑RAN ALLIANCE, WG11 carries active work items on post-quantum cryptography, and TLS 1.3 is mandated across O‑RAN interfaces precisely because it accommodates quantum-resistant algorithms.
The algorithms themselves are settled. NIST published FIPS 203, FIPS 204 and FIPS 205 in August 2024. The open question is no longer which algorithms — it is where your existing ones actually live, which of them you control, which belong to a supplier, and what replacing them does to latency, signalling load and interoperability in a network that cannot be taken down.
That gap is the work.
What we do
Know what you are running
A cryptographic inventory of the network as it is, not as the architecture diagram says it should be — expressed as a Cryptography Bill of Materials suited to telecom, not to an enterprise IT estate.
Know what changing it costs
A transition assessment that separates what you can migrate yourself from what depends on a vendor roadmap or a hardware refresh, with the performance implications measured rather than assumed.
Know that it worked
Validation against measurement, so that “migrated” is a statement you can evidence to a regulator, a customer or a board — not one you have to take on trust.
Why an independent specialist
Vendors will migrate their own products. Integrators will migrate what they are contracted to touch. Neither is positioned to tell you, across a multi-vendor 5G Standalone core and a disaggregated RAN, what your actual exposure is.
Thames Smart Tech is an independent United Kingdom company founded to do that one thing. It is led by an engineer who has worked inside the supplier side of this industry — at Ericsson, Huawei and ZTE — and who chaired Türkiye's Communication Technologies Cluster through the country's end-to-end domestic 5G programme, a national effort joining all three mobile network operators and sixteen companies.
Start with the inventory
Most organisations discover that the first honest answer to “what cryptography are we running?” takes longer than they expected. That is the finding, and it is better to have it in 2026 than in 2030.