telecom

A U.S. Army soldier was sentenced to 70 months in prison for hacking into AT&T and Verizon, stealing data of over 100 million customers, and extorting the companies.

AT&T is using AI to automate internal processes and decommission legacy services, leading to significant job cuts as it aims to modernize its telecom operations for the AI era.

Testing of eight AI personal agents revealed they cannot send SMS to arbitrary contacts due to 10DLC regulations, prompting workarounds like using carrier numbers.

The FCC has proposed a robocall mitigation scorecard to grade phone companies on spam call blocking, using metrics like call-blocking statistics and customer complaints to empower consumers and encourage better spam call mitigation.

The paper proposes CRAFT, a data-centric method for fine-tuning small language models to enable pre-hoc explainability in AI-native 6G RAN, achieving higher accuracy and energy efficiency compared to existing methods like GRPO.

TelecomGPT-R1-9B is a unified open-source telecom reasoner that achieves top performance on benchmarks through a two-stage training recipe involving supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning.

Shane Parrish shares 11 lessons from John Bragg, an entrepreneur who built a private telecom empire and controls half the world's wild blueberries, emphasizing a philosophy of growth and local impact.

This paper introduces a synthetic Bengali speech dataset of 10,000 audio-text pairs for telecom customer care scenarios, generated using OmniVoice voice-cloning, and evaluates it with an ASR model, achieving low word error rates.

The paper introduces BFTR, an algorithmic framework for telecom tariff recommendation that prioritizes customer budgets and prevents overcharging. Experiments on a Nigerian MTN-inspired dataset demonstrate the framework's effectiveness with zero surcharge and high utility.

The Supreme Court rejected Verizon's bid for a $47 million refund from an FCC fine for selling user location data without consent, concluding this specific legal challenge amid ongoing disputes from other telecom carriers.

A user questions how Starlink's planned cellular service would work inside buildings, referencing a claim that it will challenge major carriers like T-Mobile, Verizon, and AT&T.

A community post about the early end of the giffgaff account-ban wave, detailing how to donate credit balances to several UK charities via Premium SMS.

A historical essay examining the shift in telephone regulation and equipment ownership around the breakup of the Bell System, focusing on customer premises equipment and the leasing model.

SpaceX executives say Starlink Mobile will compete directly with AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon, using spectrum purchased from EchoStar and small terrestrial base stations to eliminate dead zones and attract customers.

SpaceX plans to build a terrestrial mobile network using EchoStar spectrum and Starlink dishes to compete directly with US carriers like T-Mobile, AT&T, and Verizon, aiming to acquire many of their customers.

T-Mobile is launching a new EIP Flex 36 financing option that bundles device taxes and fees into a $0-down, 36-month plan with 0% APR for a limited time, available for phones, watches, and tablets.

Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay argues the FCC lacks authority to repeal the 39% TV ownership cap, which was written into law by Congress, as the Trump FCC moves to eliminate the rule.

Verizon announces a $1B dark fiber deal with Google and plans to convert central offices into small data centers for AI inference, part of its new AI Connect initiative.

Telco-GAIA is a bilingual, multi-modal benchmark for evaluating tool-using agents in the telecom domain, comprising 100 human-verified tasks requiring multi-hop reasoning over heterogeneous sources, with objective scoring via exact string matching.

AT&T lost a court ruling in its attempt to stop offering basic phone service in California, as the state argued AT&T has not formally proposed a suitable replacement for copper lines.