- Boost Mobile CTO Eben Albertyn vows to repeat its NYC network superiority in other cities across the country
- It's easier to score high on network tests when relatively few people are using the network, but Albertyn said the company is making progress attracting customers
- AI is already showing “astounding” achievements and will do even more, Albertyn said
Open RAN works and is giving Boost Mobile unique AI advantages, according to EVP and Chief Technology Officer Eben Albertyn.
“AI has been really kind to us," he said. Because the network is cloud-native, Boost can easily access AI and use the technology to optimize and build its network and use AI for customer service, Albertyn said during a fireside chat with Competitive Carriers Association (CCA) President Tim Donovan on Wednesday.
A cynic would queue the Debby Downer music here and point out that Boost Mobile, with 7 million subscribers, doesn’t have many customers compared to its bigger rivals AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon. Sure, AI has likely been kind to Boost, but the technology hasn’t magically attracted desperately needed customers.
However, to Boost’s and parent company EchoStar’s credit, the company is turning the ship around, albeit slowly. During the fourth quarter of 2024, Boost added 90,000 net subscribers, which is far better than its previous Q4 2023 loss of 123,000 customers and Q3 2024's 297,000 loss.
Commercially, Boost Mobile is off to a great start in 2025, including with its iPhone promotions, Albertyn said. “[Boost providing] the best network and the best value is making our customers excited, and that’s giving us quarter-over-quarter net add growth,” he said. “It’s only Q1, so there’s a lot still to do in 2025,” he said.
Boost will take the network superiority it boasts in New York City to other NFL cities this year, Albertyn vowed. In January, Boost Mobile earned the distinction of being named the No. 1 network in New York City by the third-party benchmarking firm umlaut, outperforming incumbents AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon. Boost earned the distinction using open RAN. This technology works, he said.
“We've proven that it works, and we have a claim in New York. There will be multiple ones coming through this year where we keep proving out that we're the best network in every NFL city in the country,” Albertyn said.
Boost Mobile, via parent Dish Network/EchoStar, built the nation’s first 5G standalone (SA) network based entirely on open RAN, a technology considered unproven and maybe even a little unstable by some mobile operators.
Albertyn said he hears that quite often. However, “open RAN is real, and it's not as tentative as people think. It's a very mature technology,” he said. “It really does do well.”
AI and the RAN
Open RAN and AI-RAN are not competitive, Albertyn said.
“They're orthogonal to each other and because of how open RAN works and how it's been put together, it is far easier to introduce AI RAN components into open RAN than it is in any other technology,” he said.
Many associate AI only with large language models (LLMs), but “AI is a heck of a lot more than just ChatGPT and interfacing with something in English,” Albertyn said. “These bots speak to each other, and they can ask each other things, and they can help each other, which builds a very, very robust ecosystem of pretty damn intelligent things that can go off and do things by themselves.”
The flip side of that, however, is that “you are going to get absolutely nowhere with machine learning and AI if you don't have consistent, good, high-quality data. Data needs to be clean. If the data is dirty, you could potentially pollute that model forever,” he said.
AI: Nowhere to go but up
Whether an operator uses open RAN, there’s no doubt that AI is going to be a key part of operators' business and network strategies. Operators are currently only scratching the surface of AI's potential, Albertyn said.
“We've used AI extensively in the organization. I'm an engineer by training, and I'll be honest with you that there are things that the teams are doing with AI, which, to me, looks like they're breaking the laws of physics,” he said. “It's astounding what these machines can come up with. So certainly, AI will become a very big part of what we're doing.”
He ticked off a handful of questions he expects all operators will be dealing with in the coming three to five years: Whether to use open RAN, whether to go cloud-native, how much and where to use AI, and how to implement 6G.