Telecommunications providers across the globe are making significant investments in autonomous networks (AN) to leverage technology advances such as artificial intelligence (AI) and 5G connectivity. Three major players – China Telecom, China Unicom and South Africa’s MTN – discussed the importance of these investments during TM Forum’s October Digital Leadership Summit.

The providers have launched initiatives to upgrade and automate their networks to keep up which changing customer demands and market dynamics. Autonomous networks, once fully operational, will leverage artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to run with minimal human intervention, leveraging capabilities such as self-serving, self-fulfilling and self-assuring.

More than Connectivity

For China Unicom, “AN is very important to reduce the costs of capital and maintenance,” said Dr. Zizhi Qiao, Staff Architect at China Unicom’s Intelligence Network and Innovation Centre. As technology advances such as 5G become available, telecommunications networks must evolve and adapt. Providers have to do more than simply deliver connectivity services, Qiao said.

“For us, we have to provide more complicated services. We cannot only provide the connection or a cloud, we have to provide an overall complicated solution, and the solution has to be supervised and fulfilled automatically,” he said.

One of the solutions China Unicom already introduced is root cause analysis, Qiao said. AI pinpoints a problem and issues an alert ticket, prompting a technician to act. The capability, he said, has made the troubleshooting process more efficient.

Based in Beijing, China Unicom is one of the world’s largest mobile providers. Its coverage area coincides with that of China Mobile, also based in Beijing. Dr. Lingli Deng, Director of SDO Collaboration at China Mobile Research Institute’s AI Center, said the company runs the “world’s largest customer-scale mobile network.”

Digitization and ‘Intelligentization’

China Mobile is in the midst of a five-year plan to improve network quality and efficiency, Deng said. The rapid convergence of information and communications technology (ICT), and the coexistence of 2G, 3G, 4G and 5G technologies, create levels of complexity that dictate digitization and “intelligentization” to reduce operating expenses, Deng said.

Added complexity is pushing the efficient management of the network and infrastructure beyond the human boundary, so the company needs to leverage AI to automate network processes, she said. In so doing, the company also will provide an integrated, intelligent and highly automated system to support the “overall digitalization of the economy, society and people’s everyday lives.”

Personalized Services

For its part, Johannesburg, South Africa-based MTN is working on an initiative called Ambition 2025 to implement the “largest, most valuable business platform” across the African continent. It includes leveraging AI and open APIs to develop services leveraging 5G capabilities.

“We want to build a second-to-none network in all these markets. We need to improve our customer experience. We need to boost our operational efficiency and cost reduction,” said Mohamed Salah, Senior Manager, Network Operations Assurance, MTN Group.

MTN is developing an AN implementation blueprint and assessing each of the 20 markets it covers to develop use cases for new services such as DQ ODN and cross-domain fault automation. The company is reviewing industry standards and working with partners such as Huawei to develop the strategy.

The goal is to reach AN Level 4 implementation in 2025, and eventually level 5, through a step-by-step approach in each market, Salah said. Level 4 systems, as defined by TM Forum, enable, analyze and make decisions “based on predictive or active closed-loop management of service and customer experience-driven networks.”

Automation Challenges

The biggest challenges around AN, said Qiao, affect both technology and users. Providers have to “close the loop” not only on technology but also with the people who run and maintain the networks. For instance, China Unicom acts quickly on feedback from the frontlines to continuously motivate people across the company’s branches to use the technology.

“For them, it’s not only a change of technologies, it’s a change of organization and we’re changing their minds to face a new world. So this is a very important thing for us. We have to close this loop to make it work,” he said.

China Mobile, Deng says, addresses challenges by employing an iterative process to implement changes. Capability evaluations take place yearly “to identify the current status of each of our branches and to move forward in a guided, coordinated pace.”

The process identifies shortcomings that need to be fixed as the company works to add 3,000 capabilities. “With our AI platform, we are serving over 100 AI capabilities. It is really a game changer in our practice,” she said.

Salah noted that network transformation is a long, complicated journey that requires significant software development. Like China Mobile, MTN is taking it one step at a time, learning and refining its process along the way.

This content is sponsored by Huawei.

Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd