Telecom Intelligence: Week of August 19, 2024
The bill came due for the phone network's first big AI abuse case: Lingo Telecom paid $1 million for transmitting the AI-cloned Biden robocalls — the first FCC settlement to make a carrier answer for synthetic traffic it carried. Microsoft, still cleaning up after the CrowdStrike outage grounded millions of Windows machines in July, summoned the security industry to a September summit to rethink how deeply vendors run inside the operating system. And the week closed with a shock from Paris: French police arrested Telegram founder Pavel Durov at Le Bourget airport, marking the moment a government reached past a platform and took hold of the person who runs it.
Telecom Intelligence: Week of July 15, 2024
A single faulty software update ended the week by grounding airlines, silencing broadcasters, and knocking out 911 centers: CrowdStrike's botched Falcon sensor push bricked some 8.5 million Windows machines in the largest IT outage in history. Earlier in the week, EchoStar relaunched Boost Mobile as a self-declared fourth carrier on its cloud-native 5G network with a $25-forever flagship plan, the FCC proposed requiring all phones be unlocked 60 days after activation, and Nokia's second quarter confirmed that operator equipment spending remains stuck in a deep trough.