Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:02):
Okay, well we're in London for the Ericsson OSS/BSS 2025 event. I'm here with Mark Sanders from Telstra, and Jason Keane from Ericsson. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us this afternoon. Good to see you. So Mark, you are one of the speakers here at the summit and your presentation is about autonomous networks powering the next era of intelligent connectivity. Can you tell us more about that?

Mark Sanders, Telstra (00:27):
Yeah, well it's great to be here, first of all, collaborating with the industry and so many other operators. But we think of autonomous networks just as not another innovation. It's something that's going to really transform and change how we work, how every part of the network and the planning, design, operations, assurance, every part of the network's going to change over the coming years. And we think that that journey is not a linear progression. It's not a matter of taking one step and then simply rolling onto the next step. It's about stepping back and making sure we lay the right foundations. And so what I'll be talking about in my presentation is what are some of the missing foundations, the extra work we have to do that's going to be necessary for us to realize a lofty goal that we all have for an autonomous network.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (01:12):
And Jason, can you tell us how Ericsson is helping Telstra to achieve its autonomous network goals?

Jason Keane, Ericsson (01:18):
Sure. I'd like to think actually Telstra and Ericsson are helping each other. Telstra has been very good partner for us and they have a vision and an execution strategy that they need support in doing. Ericsson has capacity to help support, but what Mark has said there is that we just want to look at what the industry can look like and how we can move it forward. Ericsson's the same, given our role in the industry, we also want to move it forward. So what we're working with Telstra is what the future can look around something called a knowledge plane, how we connect data to make it more useful for them so we can have an impact and support the autonomous operations and autonomous networks that Telstra and other customers want to achieve.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (01:53):
Now Mark, you've spoken about the industry facing a challenging trilemma of how it optimizes for scale, reliability and efficiency. Can you talk more about those challenges and your collaboration with Ericsson to overcome them?

Mark Sanders, Telstra (02:10):
Yeah. Well, often we can't achieve all three. That's been always the challenge. If you're trying to scale something up, well your cost and efficiencies are often challenged. If you want to make your network more resilient, also places pressure. Then when you want to optimize, it places pressure back on the other two. So that's the challenge of the trilemma. But we think in an autonomous network, all the conditions are coming together so that we can actually solve more of those three. But as I said a moment ago, it's not just some great innovation, it is fundamentally changing how we need to work. And our collaboration with Ericsson that we're going to be doing is in the three areas, and Jason just mentioned probably the most important one, the knowledge plane

(02:50):
That we think is the foundational element, but also building upon intent and intent networks and closing out some of the work we need to do there. How do we manage conflict in an intent network and some of those challenges, but also trustworthy AI, we think of the network and we want to reason and then act on the network. We've all experienced the probabilistic nature of our large language models. We need to build trust, explainability in all the actions we're taking into the network, but also reap all the benefits of this new technology. So the trilemma is the challenge that we need to have and autonomous networks is the way to get there. And this collaboration with Ericsson and intent, trustworthy AI and of course the knowledge plane.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (03:34):
So Jason, I mean you mentioned the knowledge plane before Mark has now as well, but can you tell us more about that? Because that sounds like quite a sort of next generation concept.

Jason Keane, Ericsson (03:45):
It is a next generation concept. And actually what is, it's coming out really from the paradigm shift we need to take, what we see in working with Telstra in this is that ultimately knowledge is what you have. It's what defines an organization. And we've taken our knowledge traditionally and put them into automating workflows using traditional software. But that kind of workflow automation is done because we know something that we want to automate. What we're seeing now is if we can get a real view of what the network looks like, what services, a topology, and map it into this kind of layer called knowledge, we now start to understand, or we have a place where we can start to understand what the network behavior is, what's going on and what's happening. So it's this kind of layer that then we can put agents or AI on top to do something next to achieve that autonomy. So it is kind of this secret sauce of making this happen, because if you don't have good knowledge, you won't act accordingly. And Mark was referred about trustworthy AI. Trustworthy is can I assure that the extra output is good for my business? So the knowledge layer that the knowledge plane, it's super important to get right. And I think Telstra and ourselves, we understand how important this is. We don't have all the answers today, but we want to explore because we see it. This is how we'll move our industry forward.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (04:55):
Well, I mean already we've heard a lot about collaboration at this event and clearly that's important to everybody and it's good to see companies like Ericsson and Telstra giving real world example of that. So Jason, Mark, thanks so much for joining us.

Jason Keane, Ericsson (05:10):
Thanks.

Mark Sanders, Telstra (05:10):
Thanks.