What’s up with… AI-native telco R&D and deployments

• Mavenir and Telefónica set up an AI Innovation Hub 
• Mavenir and Red Hat team up on conversational and agentic AI 
• Arrcus unveils its inference network fabric
• Lumen deploys Blue Planet’s AI agents

In today’s industry news roundup: It’s an AI-native telco special with Mavenir hooking up with Telefónica and Red Hat on separate AI-focused endeavours, Arrcus aiming to improve the delivery of inferencing AI applications across highly distributed networks, and US operator Lumen turning to Ciena’s Blue Planet for agentic AI help.  

Telefónica has agreed to set up a joint AI Innovation Hub with cloud-native telco tech specialist Mavenir to help “accelerate the integration of artificial intelligence into the evolution of core networks,” the companies have announced. By emulating production‑grade traffic patterns in a controlled environment, the partners will use the hub “as a real‑world testbed where advanced capabilities, such as AI‑driven autonomous network orchestration, intent‑based services, and AI‑enabled monetization frameworks, can be developed, validated, and optimised,” they noted (see more about Telefónica’s autonomous networks progress here). Cayetano Carbajo, Core, Transport and Ecosystem Director at Telefónica’s CTIO office, stated: “Our collaboration with Mavenir sets a new benchmark in Telefónica’s commitment to lead the industry in AI-driven Core network transformation. By combining Mavenir’s cloud-native core and service platforms with our real-world operational environment, we can transform the core network and rapidly operationalize AI-powered services that are ready for commercial deployment.” Check out this announcement for more details. 

Mavenir has also teamed up with open source specialist Red Hat to develop conversational AI and agentic AI service assurance solutions using Red Hat AI and OpenShift. “This collaboration is focused on transforming the telecommunications industry by providing service providers with AI solutions that leverage their existing platform investments while delivering additional security, resiliency, with low latency that is critical for real-time network operations,” noted the partners in this announcement. Mavenir’s aim is to provide AI solutions “tailored to the telecommunications industry that are purpose built to be more cost-effective and more secure than hosted as-a-service AI solutions,” it noted. Sachin Karkala, executive VP and general manager of IMS & RAN at Mavenir, stated: “In the race to monetise AI and evolve to autonomous networks, service providers need control of the user experience, cost and data privacy.  Our collaboration with Red Hat enables us to develop on-premises AI solutions that do just that.  Generative AI models can be fine-tuned using service provider data to build specialised, on-premises agents helping deliver optimal performance.”

Virtualised routing vendor Arrcus, which made headlines last year when Nvidia joined its latest funding round, has announced a significant uptick in business – “record 3x bookings growth in 2025 across datacenter, telco and enterprise customers” – and the launch of its “AI policy-aware” Arrcus Inference Network Fabric (AINF). This new system is “designed to improve the delivery of inferencing AI applications across a highly distributed network by steering traffic between inferencing nodes, caches, and datacentres with the goal of increasing throughput Tokens per second (TPS), reducing Time to First Token (TTFT), and improving End to End Latency (E2EL) for inferencing,” the company noted in this announcement. Shekar Ayyar, chairman and CEO of Arrcus, stated: “To enhance agentic AI adoption by improving response times, networks need to become AI-aware. AINF extends Arrcus’s leadership in distributed networking by delivering the first fabric designed to meet the latency, sovereignty, and power constraints of large-scale AI inferencing,” he added. 

US long-distance network operator Lumen Technologies will further its automated networking aspirations with the deployment of AI agents from Ciena’s Blue Planet division, which develops automation software for network operators. “As part of its strategy to build the trusted network for AI, Lumen will use Blue Planet AI Studio, an operations support system (OSS)-native platform, to build, manage, and run AI agents across multiple network domains to drive faster, context-aware outcomes,” noted the vendor in this announcement. Kye Prigg, chief commercial operations officer at Lumen Technologies, stated: “Across our enterprise operations, we’re using AI to digitize and automate core processes, eliminate legacy complexity, boost agility and speed, and free our teams to focus on higher‑value innovation that improves the customer experience. Blue Planet AI Studio is helping Lumen introduce AI-driven capabilities into our OSS environment across real-world workflows, enabling the creation of AI agents to help streamline operational tasks and reduce costs.”

– The staff, TelecomTV