# OTel: Building Domain-Specialized Telecom LLM Foundations for Intelligent Networks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.15436 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.15436/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 2 of its 9 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Aug 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [What Disease does this Patient Have? A Large-scale Open Domain Question Answering Dataset from Medical Exams](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.13081/) (2020)
- [SPEC5G: A Dataset for 5G Cellular Network Protocol Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.09201/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Frontier AI models have advanced rapidly, but they still struggle with telecom-specific tasks. We present Open Telco (OTel), an open telecom AI resource with derived datasets for retrieval, reranking, instruction tuning, and safety/abstention, plus 30 full-parameter post-trained baselines across embedding, reranking, and language models. The community has already engaged substantially with the resource: as of May 3, 2026, the released models have been downloaded over 16 million times, and the project has received 157+ pieces of media coverage worldwide. Building on prior open telecom datasets and benchmarks, OTel provides documented telecom data sources, held-out evaluation partitions, trained embedding models, rerankers, context-grounded LLMs, and safety/abstention data in one unified resource. OTel post-training improves performance across all three model families: embedding retrieval reaches 93.5% NDCG@10, reranking reaches 0.952 MRR@10, and language-model correctness reaches 88.2%. We release OTel as a reproducible starting point and invite the community to expand the data, improve embedding and reranking models, and build stronger context-grounded telecom LLMs.