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SK Telecom employees inspect network system equipment using the company's AI-based A-STAR, Tuesday. Courtesy of SK Telecom |
By Baek Byung-yeul
SK Telecom developed A-STAR, an artificial intelligence-based solution for wireless network quality management, and applied it to its network base stations nationwide as part of efforts to improve service quality by detecting abnormalities quickly, the company said Tuesday.
A-STAR monitors the status of hundreds of thousands of base stations nationwide, finds equipment that is expected to cause problems affecting network quality, alerts field operation managers and, at the same time, recommends how to fix the issues, the company explained.
"A-STAR preemptively responds to deterioration in wireless network quality. By doing so, the solution minimizes customer inconvenience," the company said.
SK Telecom said A-STAR analyzes the quality of base station equipment every hour and reports abnormalities to field managers, and also analyzes the cause of quality degradation by looking at an average of 250 kinds of data per equipment.
During a test operation in 2022, the AI solution greatly helped the field operation managers, reducing the time required for equipment quality analysis by 80.7 percent. Also, the preemptive improvement measures of the equipment was improved by 46.7 percent.
SK Telecom developed the AI solution in collaboration between field operation experts from the company and SK Ons, a network maintenance affiliate of SK Group. SK Telecom began developing A-STAR in 2020 and improved its quality to the level that it can be applied to actual field operations.
A-STAR is designed to continuously improve its performance by receiving and relearning the final measurements from field quality improvement managers. To improve the efficiency of the network quality management, SK Telecom will continue to upgrade A-STAR by shortening the analysis cycle, which currently performs an analysis every hour.
"The company has further upgraded network operation by using AI technology," said Park Myung-soon, vice president and head of Infra DT Office at SK Telecom. "We will continue to innovate our system to establish an AI-based infrastructure."