Team Partners Telecommunications

How are telecoms companies using AI?

Posted on Jul 25, 2024

There are, in life, things that can come up on one and hit you from behind, flooring you almost before you notice they’re there...getting older for example, or the rise in the everyday cost of living, maybe the rise of Coldplay to supergroup level... and then there’s Artificial Intelligence,  AI, which was the stuff of fantasy and fiction one day and is real and worrying the next.

We explained a little about the different levels of AI back in December ’23, What is known as Weak AI, such as Siri, Alexa and a Spam filter does a single job. Strong AI can understand and learn any intellectual task that a human can and, as yet, remains a theoretical form of AI. Its most defining feature will be that it has a self-aware consciousness that makes it capable of solving problems, learning, and planning for the future, and then there’s Super AI, which remains, for the moment, wildly conceptual.

So, why are we returning to AI this month?  It’s because of its increasing use, not just by our mobile phones but by the telecoms companies that support them. You may have seen the recent news (June ’24) that Apple will be building AI into its mobile operation system, extending its use to Siri to make both Siri and iPhones generally, quicker and more efficient. Samsung and Google are doing much the same, which is all well and good, but it does have the down side of putting a lot more pressure on our mobile phone networks as they try and keep up with the extra data demands this causes.

What should they do? Why, Turn to AI, of course! And so they are, using it to manage their frequencies so they provide optimal levels of service and their mobile masts so they use less energy at times of lesser demand.

It would be nice to think that the UK is ahead of the curve in this, but we’re not. In South Korea, a local provider is able to localise and fix faults within in a minute by using AI to monitor their networks, and the USA’s AT&T is using predictive AI algorithms to tell when things are about to go wrong. In the UK, Vodaphone is using an AI digital twin of their physical network to monitor how it’s performing.

How will this explosion in data usage effect the development of our national mobile infrastructure?  Those of us finding ourselves stuck with 3G as we travel the country may not be entirely  reassured to hear that operators are continuing to invest in Standalone 5G, rather than fighting the tide by upgrading existing 4G networks, offering as it does, higher speeds and capacity. There are those, though, who tell us that AI won’t be able to fully spread its wings until the roll-out of 6G from 2028.

Is there any genuinely good news in all of this? Perhaps. A new joint venture four or five of Europe’s biggest telecoms companies is  just one venture working on a telecoms specific AI chatbot, so when you ring to complain about lousy coverage or any other problems, your call will be answered quickly and efficiently and even, potentially, by a machine you can understand.