Deutsche Telekom executive Axel Clauberg says his employer and other telecom companies are eager to tap artificial-intelligence techniques that are revolutionizing other industries. "It's not as easy as it sounds for telcos to attract top talent," Clauberg says. "That was different in the '80s and early '90s when the initial mobile networks were built, the smart creators of the world were joining telcos. But today telcos and [telecommunications] vendors are not attractive to top talent." When it comes to AI, Facebook, Google and a handful of other tech companies have practically cornered the market on experts.

The Telecom Infra Project (TIP) launched three new project groups at its second annual TIP summit. The groups will tackle network slicing, artificial intelligence (AI), and open radio access networks (RAN). Facebook co-founded TIP in 2016, along with Intel, Nokia, Deutsche Telekom, and SK Telecom. Its mission is similar to that of the Open Compute Project (OCP) in terms of disaggregating software and hardware. TIP's focus, however, is telecom specific in its work to develop and deploy new networking technologies.

The FCC granted Alphabet's Project Loon, which delivers internet via balloons, an experimental license last month to help get Puerto Ricans online after Hurricane Maria decimated the island's infrastructure. While the team cautiously tweeted that it would'explore of it was possible to help,' Project Loon announced today that it has worked with AT&T and T-Mobile to successfully deliver basic internet to over 100,000 Puerto Ricans to the internet. Since turning on service, #ProjectLoon has delivered basic internet connectivity to more than 100K people in Puerto Rico. It's not a total success, which isn't to be expected after Puerto Ricans' communications infrastructure suffered so much damage. But the team was able to work with AT&T and T-Mobile to get "communication and internet activities like sending text messages and accessing information online for some people with LTE enabled phones," head of Project Loon Alastair Westgarth wrote in a blog post.

From the data-center perspective, flapping events are those that occur when a service or host starts changing its state too frequently. This results in a large number of alarms, which can indicate either transient or real network problems. Some of the reasons for flapping events to occur are hardware/software errors, storage issues, unreliable connections and broken communication links. Event flapping causes resource wastage, decreased performance, and diminished customer experience. We estimate that 50% of the tickets raised during monitoring are "flapping events."

NEW DELHI: As telecom companies are adopting technologies like virtualization, SDN-NFV, orchestration; Artificial Intelligence is going to play a big role in smooth integration of these technologies and automating the networks. As explained by Counterpoint Research, AI application in mobile networks circles around three applications – Self Optimizing networks (SONs), Software defined networks (SDN) & Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and enablement of neural networks. Among these, we may see SONs at the earliest. SONs enable operators automatically to optimize the network quality based on traffic information by region and time zone based on various machine learning algorithms. IDC on the other hand has predicted that 31.5% of the telecommunication organizations are primarily focusing to leverage existing investments/infrastructure and rest 63.5% are making new technology investments for AI systems.

The Huawei Mate 10 is making its way to market internationally and includes some features consumers may not find standard on other 2017 smartphones. The device features the Kirin 970 chip, which includes a dedicated NPU (Neural Network Processing Chip). The Kirin 970 powers AI capabilities, which are primarily centered around the Huawei Mate 10 camera. The device features a dual camera setup that includes a 20-megapixel monochrome lens and a 12-megapixel RGB lens with f/1.6 aperture on both lenses and optical image stabilization on the RGB lens. Other features include BSI CMOS, Dual-LED flash PDAF, CAF, Laser, Depth autofocus, 2x Hybrid Zoom and 4K video recording.

NEW DELHI: As telecom companies are adopting technologies like virtualization, SDN-NFV, orchestration; Artificial Intelligence is going to play a big role in smooth integration of these technologies and automating the networks. As explained by Counterpoint Research, AI application in mobile networks circles around three applications – Self Optimizing networks (SONs), Software defined networks (SDN) & Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and enablement of neural networks. Among these, we may see SONs at the earliest. SONs enable operators automatically to optimize the network quality based on traffic information by region and time zone based on various machine learning algorithms. IDC on the other hand has predicted that 31.5% of the telecommunication organizations are primarily focusing to leverage existing investments/infrastructure and rest 63.5% are making new technology investments for AI systems.

Difficult times for operators call for questioning old orthodoxies to win. For the better part of a decade, telecom companies have suffered through declining revenues, cash flow, and return on investment just as tech companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and others have mushroomed by building their businesses on the operators' own infrastructure. While these tech visionaries have enjoyed well over $1 trillion in combined market-cap growth by innovating and thinking differently and adeptly, telecom companies have tried to compete by implementing the same old survival tactics: cutting costs, reducing the workforce, and timidly entering into new business adjacencies. The trouble is that playbook no longer applies. It's time the telecom companies embrace this new reality and rethink the key orthodoxies that have shaped their industry since the first phone call was made about 140 years ago. If not, the alternative is dire.

Businesses have long been told to think outside the box--but what about thinking outside the industry? Artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics have brought dramatic improvements in efficiency and overall quality to a wide variety of sectors, including automotive and e-commerce. Can they change the game for telecom companies, too? The idea that what's good for General Motors is good for telcos might seem a bit unorthodox. They are, after all, very different businesses. Yet this year's telco IT benchmarking study (TeBIT)--a survey of European operators' IT spending and performance that was completed in August 2017--suggests that some telcos, at least, are beginning to see how AI and robotics could benefit them.

It's been over six weeks since Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, leaving millions without power or access to reliable communication. The storm clobbered the island's communications infrastructure--after all, cell towers can't produce a signal without power, and backup batteries only last hours. The hurricane damaged the above-ground fiber lines that connect towers to the main network, too. AT&T, for example, is using stop-gap measures like portable cell towers on trucks to help get the network back up, and says that 70 percent of the population there is now covered by their network. And then there are the balloons.