Telenor exec levels with telcos over autonomous network ambitionsTelenor exec levels with telcos over autonomous network ambitions

The TM Forum's Autonomous Networks project sets out a six-step program that is designed to accompany telcos as they evolve their operations from being fully manual (level 0) to fully autonomous (level 5). Once a telco reaches level 5, it should have closed loop automation capabilities across multiple services and domains, and the entire lifecycle.

To be sure, this will not be an easy journey for any telco as they grapple with implementing new technologies, including various flavors of artificial intelligence (AI), and offloading cumbersome legacy systems.

Speaking during a FutureNet World webinar titled "Transforming data into business value with AI and automation," Afnan Ahmed, director, technology strategy and architecture at Telenor, provided a pretty blunt assessment of telcos' progress along the autonomous networks path.

While noting that no operator has achieved level 5 autonomy to date, he also expressed doubts that any operator "is going to achieve level 5 autonomy as it is defined in the next few years."

Moreover, he appeared dubious about operators' level 4 ambitions, suggesting that level 4 solutions will be on the market no earlier than in two to three years' time.

Ahmed, who also sits on the Autonomous Networks leadership team at TM Forum, said many operators, including Orange, have committed to achieving level 4 "in a few years." Indeed, Orange has said its goal is to achieve level 4 network autonomy in 2025. 

"Based on my experience, the furthest that anyone has come is actually China Mobile. They will probably achieve level 4 in cross domain, level 4 solutions in 2026, early 2027," he said.

Ahmed remarked that one of the biggest obstacles to achieving an autonomous network is a telco's own operations support system (OSS).

"A typical operator like Telenor, which has been an incumbent in Norway for 160 years, we operate more than 200 different homegrown and vendor-provided OSS solutions. And until we can get rid of those 200 systems, you're not going to achieve level 3, level 4 or level 5 autonomy," he said. 

As for Telenor's own efforts, "recently, we have gone from automation to infusing AI into the operations, and that's where the autonomous networks comes in. That's one level above automation. Automation was something that we've done [and that] the industry has done. Autonomous network, as the name suggests, is when human intervention is minimal or none."

Ahmed added: "There's this concept called the dark NOC which many operators around the world are now championing. We are on that journey now, and with that, some of the use cases would be related to energy efficiency, some … to call handling and incident management, but without human intervention." 

Aiming for zero touch 

Also on the panel was Sana Ben Jemaa, technical lead of AI empowered networks program at Orange, who described the operator as being "in the middle of the journey of automation towards autonomous networks."

One example of what she described as a "simple use case" already deployed by Orange in more than one country is battery lifetime prediction, "avoiding having field intervention to change batteries, because with AI, you can predict how much the battery can be used based on data collected in the network."

Fellow panellist Mabel Pous-Fenollar, global head of digital and zero touch operations at Vodafone, attempted to answer a question about what percentage of operations have been automated. Here, she observed that a high-value use case for autonomous networks "resides on the incident management side of things." 

"So what I can say is that the automation percentage depends, and we have many operators, and it is fair to say that some operating companies are more advanced than others, but what we have seen is that you are able [in] the incident management process to achieve up to 80% zero touch incident management of the NOC, of the first line [of support]," she said.