What’s up with… SK Telecom, T-Mobile US, the FCC

• SK Telecom puts its telco-specific LLM to work
• T-Mobile US has reportedly fallen victim to Chinese hackers
• Brendan Carr will be the next head of the FCC

SK Telecom (SKT) is putting its AI R&D to work: The South Korean operator says it launched its AI Customer Service Support System, which is underpinned by its proprietary telecommunications-specialised large language model (Telco LLM) and large multimodal model (LMM), as a beta service in October and that it has been “delivering solid results. In the buildup to the launch, SKT undertook a “comprehensive restructuring of its knowledge management system, extensive model optimisation, and the creation of rich training datasets with input from dozens of customer service experts,” the company noted in this announcement. “Through rigorous testing and iterative reinforcement learning, SK Telecom has refined its Telco LLM and LMM to meet the unique demands of telecommunications services. A key innovation in the system is the implementation of Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), which significantly enhances response accuracy by retrieving relevant information and leveraging this information in the response generation,” it added. One of the system’s features, the AI Knowledge Search Assistant, which was launched on 21 October, is “a natural language interface that enables agents to instantly access relevant information without manual searching, similar to advanced AI platforms like Perplexity or ChatGPT,” explained SKT, adding that this feature is now “being refined through real-world usage and will be fully deployed across all customer service operations in 2025.” Hong Seung Tae, vice president and head of the customer value innovation office at SK Telecom, noted: “Our transformation into an AI contact centre represents more than just operational efficiency – it’s about delivering truly personalised, customer-centric service. Through our Telco LLM-based AI Customer Service Support System, we expect to set new standards in customer service excellence and position ourselves as the industry leader in AI-driven customer support.” SKT is one of the founding members of the Global AI Telco Alliance, which aims to develop telecom sector-specific LLMs that can be used by multiple service providers. 

T-Mobile US was one of the telcos hacked by Chinese cybercriminals during a campaign to spy on the wireless communications of prominent individuals that lasted months, according to an investigation by The Wall Street Journal (WSJ). The telco told Reuters that it is “closely monitoring this industry-wide attack”, and that its “systems and data have not been impacted in any significant way, and we have no evidence of impacts to customer information.” The report comes days after the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) jointly announced that the US government’s ongoing investigation into the ”targeting of commercial telecommunications infrastructure” by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) “has revealed a broad and significant cyber espionage campaign. Specifically, we have identified that PRC-affiliated actors have compromised networks at multiple telecommunications companies to enable the theft of customer call records data, the compromise of private communications of a limited number of individuals who are primarily involved in government or political activity, and the copying of certain information that was subject to US law enforcement requests pursuant to court orders. We expect our understanding of these compromises to grow as the investigation continues.” The WSJ’s report comes just as credit ratings agency Moody’s warns that telcos are among the companies most at risk from cyber threats – see Telecom moves into highest level of cyber risk – Moody’s.

As expected, Republican Brendan Carr has been appointed by US President-elect Donald Trump as the next chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), taking over from current chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel. Carr, a current FCC commissioner, wasted no time in taking to X (Twitter) to identify some of the changes he is ready to make at the US telecom regulator in 2025, including an end to the commission’s strategic goal of promoting diversity, equity [sic], inclusion  and accessibility, the dismantling of what he refers to as the “censorship cartel” (which includes the likes of Google, Apple, Meta/Facebook and Microsoft) and a crackdown on broadcast media companies to ensure they act “in the public interest” (Carr believes they have not been doing that recently…). To get a sense of what Carr will bring to the table, see what he had to say in his chapter for a document known as Project 25. The coming year will have the telecom and media sector in the US on the edge of their seats, it seems, though don’t expect Elon Musk’s X to be in any firing line, of course…  

The global telecom and pay-TV services sector is set to be worth $1,544bn in 2024, representing a year-on-year increase of 2.4%, according to research firm IDC. “The latest prediction is 1.0 percentage points higher than the version published in May… If that forecast becomes reality, the above-mentioned annual growth rate would be the highest recorded in the last 12 years,” noted IDC, though it did also mention that the growth has been driven in part by inflation driving up the costs of services. The team at IDC also used the occasion of its market valuation forecast to suggest that telcos should “aim for a complete transformation – from traditional commodity service providers to modern, full-stack technology suppliers. This transformation should position them as leaders in the digital transformation revolution, potentially securing a central role in the new digitalised world.” That suggestion sounds like it’s a few years too late…

Iliad founder and chairman Xavier Niel believes Europe has the opportunity to play a major role in AI developments as long as it commits to some modest investments and then holds its nerve. Niel told the Financial Times that Europe can create “competitive AI models… with a few hundred million euros… But over the next two or three years, [success] depends on the number of initiatives and the ability of those who are the real geniuses – those building the best companies – not to be swallowed up or to sell too quickly.” Can Europe’s AI entrepreneurs withstand the offer to sell out to potential buyers from North America or Asia? There’s something in Niel’s message that suggests he believes they might not…

– The staff, TelecomTV