The Autonomous Network Journey, Part 1: Why AN-4 Is a Business Transformation, Not an IT Project
The telecom industry has a habit of turning transformation into a technology program. We did it with cloud, we did it with SDN and NFV, and we’ve done it repeatedly with OSS modernization. A new architecture is selected, platforms are procured, integration programs begin, and everyone waits for the promised operational transformation to follow. Sometimes this approach works. More often, though, it doesn’t. Autonomous networking risks following the same path. There’s no question the technology has advanced considerably. AI can correlate events across domains, identify patterns that would take engineers hours to uncover, recommend corrective actions, and increasingly execute those actions automatically. But reaching AN-4 isn’t primarily a question of whether those capabilities exist. The harder question is whether the operator is prepared to run its business differently. Technology is usually the easier part Most operators already have plenty of technology. The problem is that it sits in...