What’s up with… SK Telecom, Ethio Telecom, SUSE

• SKT establishes an ‘AI Code of Conduct’
• Ethio Telecom to float a 10% stake for $250m
• SUSE updates its telco cloud platform

In today’s industry news roundup: SK Telecom has set out its AI-focused approach to corporate life and thinking with a multi-faceted code of conduct; Ethio Telecom unveils its IPO; open-source specialist SUSE has updated its telco cloud platform; and much more!

As part of its efforts to become a global AI company, South Korea’s SK Telecom has established the AI Code of Conduct – dubbed THE AI –  that sets out “the basic principles of AI governance” by which the company abides as its executes its AI Pyramid strategy that was unveiled just over a year ago. “AI governance is an AI technology management system and a value pursued by SKT that was proactively introduced into the management system to ensure the reliability and stability of artificial intelligence and ensure strong execution of the AI ​​pyramid strategy,” the company noted in this announcement (in Korean). THE AI is an acronym for “by ‘Telco, for Humanity, with Ethics AI’ and is the foundation of SKT’s AI Code of Conduct, which has three key pillars. First, there is the ‘Telco-based Code of Conduct’, which refers to the secure application of the company’s customer data management know-how to various AI technology services. Second is the ‘Code of Conduct for Humanity’, which is “about building a human-centred AI service environment that ensures that AI technology operates without bias for all customers to prevent the creation of digital disadvantages and helps solve social problems in various fields such as education, health, and employment”. And, finally, the ‘Ethics Code of Conduct’, which focuses on “human-centred AI through practices such as establishing specific standards for the overall development and operation of related services so that non-discrimination and non-violence values ​​can be actively applied to AI technology.” The AI Code of Conduct is being embedded in SKT’s corporate regulations and all staff are required to pledge to abide by the code. “Establishing the AI ​​Code of Conduct and having all members sign a pledge to implement it has further solidified SK Telecom’s will to realise responsible AI governance,” stated Eom Jong-hwan, head of SKT’s ESG Innovation Division. “It will serve as a stepping stone for our advancement into a global AI company,” added Jong-hwan. 

Still in South Korea… Coordination or collusion? The country’’s regulators have got themselves in a pickle over alleged telecom operator collusion. On one side is the telecom regulator, the Korea Communications Commission (KCC), on the other, South Korea’s Fair Trade Commission (FTC), and somewhere in the middle are the country’s three big mobile operators, KT Corp, SK Telecom and LG Uplus. The issue is whether the telcos had illegally colluded by coordinating the sales incentives they paid to their mobile phone retailers. For the FTC, the facts and numbers of the case screamed “collusion” and it, therefore, went ahead with plans to fine the three operators a total of about 5.5 trillion won ($4bn), reportedly the largest fines the FTC has ever levied – much to the chagrin of  the telecom regulator. The KCC claims the operators’ apparent coordination was actually the result of them slavishly following KCC guidance, which had stemmed, in turn, from the government’s mobile Device Distribution Improvement Act, under which smartphone sales incentives were to be set to less than 300,000 won per smartphone. Furthermore, the regulator had actually collected 146.4bn won ($106m) in fines from the operators for their guidance violations between 2014 (when the act was introduced) and 2023, so it wasn’t as if they hadn’t already been made accountable. “It's like being punished for simply following the government’s orders,” said an industry official, according to The Korea Times. Despite that revelation, however, the FTC is expected to remain adamant that the fines should stand, since the companies were clearly coordinating their activities with or without the official guidance factor over the sales incentives. Plus, it’s felt that the FTC and the government are keen to be seen to be taking what amounts to antitrust action against large corporations.

Ethio Telecom, the national operator in Ethiopia, is becoming a publicly traded company by offering up 10% of its shares for sale to the general public and, by doing so, becoming the first company to undertake an IPO (initial public offering) on the country’s bourse, which is set to be launched in November as the Ethiopian government tries to attract new investment into the country and boost the economy. The government, which awarded the country’s second telecom licence to Safaricom Telecommunications Ethiopia, a local telecom operating company owned by a consortium that includes Vodafone, Vodacom and Safaricom, in 2021, has been trying to attract more overseas telecom players to invest in the country but has so far failed to find any more interested parties (and abandoned a plan to issue a third telecom operator licence), though it still harbours aspirations to sell a further 45% stake in Ethio Telecom to foreign investors in the future. Ethio Telecom, which has 79 million customers, is offering 100 million shares, 10% of its equity, at 300 birr ($2.49) each, a move that will raise almost $250m for the government: Applications to buy shares – anything from 33 shares to 3,333 shares – can be made by the country’s registered citizens from now until 3 January 2025. In its most recently full financial year (to June 2024), Ethio Telecom generated revenues of 93bn birr ($774m) and believes it can increase that to 163.7bn birr ($1.36bn) in the current financial year that runs to June 2025 and increase its customer base to 83 million, the telco noted in its recently published annual business plan.  

German open-source software specialist SUSE has launched its Adaptive Telco Infrastructure Platform (ATIP) 3.1, which it says “improves operational efficiency and reduces costs incurred by telecom [operators] by providing an open-source, lightweight common telco cloud layer to host virtualised and container-based network functions.” SUSE has long believed it can help telcos deploy and manage edge cloud instances in a more simplistic and effective way than is currently possible, and developed its ATIP modular software package from scratch rather than adapting pre-existing code and aligning it to the specifications and architectural recommendations of Project Sylva, a “cross-telco-industry effort to enable edge interoperability with a common open-source container-as-a-service (CaaS) layer.” Keith Basil, general manager of the SUSE Edge business unit, noted: “SUSE ATIP 3.1 is a telco-optimised edge computing platform designed to help communication service providers realise the benefits of cloud migration by adopting a single unified core stack, single toolchain and single skillset approach. ATIP is an open and flexible platform that supports the stringent performance requirements of telco workloads and allows CSPs to freely choose the best-of-breed vendors to deliver cloud-native telco networks of the future,” he added. 

– The staff, TelecomTV