Rakuten Mobile achieves Japan’s highest TM Forum AN level validation score for fault management

• Rakuten Mobile achieves a validated 3.95 score, the highest publicly reported result for TM Forum’s current IP Network Fault Management assessment.
• AI-driven, closed-loop automation detects, analyzes, decides and resolves network faults on a live commercial network without routine human intervention.
• Powered by Rakuten Symphony OSS, the achievement builds on Rakuten Mobile’s Level 4 RAN Energy Efficiency Optimization milestone and creates a proven blueprint for operators worldwide.

TOKYO - Rakuten Mobile, Inc. and Rakuten Symphony, Inc. today announced that Rakuten Mobile’s autonomous IP Network Fault Management solution has achieved a score of 3.95 in TM Forum’s Autonomous Network Level Assessment Validation (ANLAV), Japan’s highest publicly reported score for the current TM Forum IP Network Fault Management assessment, GB1523E v2.0.1. The solution was developed in close collaboration with Rakuten Symphony and is powered by Rakuten Symphony’s OSS platform.

The achievement demonstrates that autonomy is moving beyond individual automation tasks to end-to-end, closed-loop network operations. Across the Fault Management lifecycle, Rakuten Mobile’s system continuously moves from intent and awareness to analysis, decision and execution, identifying network issues, determining the appropriate response and executing remediation without routine manual escalation.

For Rakuten Mobile, the result advances a strategy to fundamentally change how cloud-native networks are operated.

“Autonomous fault management changes the role of our network operations teams from responding to incidents to proactively improving the network,” said Shailesh Gupta, Director, Network Operations, Rakuten Mobile. “By continuously identifying and resolving faults without routine manual intervention, we can improve network resilience and service quality while giving our engineers more time to focus on optimization, innovation and what comes next.”

“The significance is not simply that a system can detect a fault,” added Jijo John, Head, IPTX Network Engineering, Rakuten Mobile. “It is that the network can understand what is happening, determine the appropriate action and execute that action autonomously, allowing our engineers to move from reacting to incidents toward designing and improving the network.”

The achievement also builds on Rakuten Mobile’s earlier TM Forum Level 4 validation for RAN Energy Efficiency Optimization, which demonstrated autonomous energy conservation in a live Open RAN environment. Unlike energy efficiency, which focuses on traffic optimization, Fault Management is one of the most demanding areas of network operations, requiring high-level safety and real-time decision-making in response to unpredictable events. The score of 3.95 achieved in this domain serves as proof that Rakuten’s autonomous operational technology has reached an exceptionally high level of reliability. Together, the milestones show how the operator is applying a common cloud-native, AI-driven automation foundation across different network domains, turning autonomy from a single use case into an operating model.

“Rakuten Mobile gives us a production environment in which to solve some of telecom’s hardest operational challenges, and we turn those lessons into solutions that can be applied beyond Japan,” said Vivek Murthy, Executive Officer and President of OSS BU, Rakuten Symphony. “This Fault Management achievement demonstrates that autonomy can be implemented as a repeatable capability across network operations.”

Andy Tiller, EVP, Member Products at TM Forum added, “Rakuten Mobile’s achievement demonstrates how advanced autonomy can be applied to one of the most critical and complex areas of network operations: detecting, analyzing and resolving faults while maintaining service continuity. The validation provides further evidence that the industry is making measurable progress toward Level 4 autonomy using common frameworks and standards, and shows how AI-driven, closed-loop operations can move network management from reactive intervention toward increasingly autonomous operations.”

Technical foundation and validated capabilities

Rakuten Mobile’s Autonomous IP Network Fault Management solution, developed in collaboration with Rakuten Symphony, uses Rakuten Symphony’s OSS platform to orchestrate an AI-driven, closed-loop fault management process across the network. The TM Forum validation evaluated the solution across multiple real-world IP network fault scenarios, demonstrating autonomous capabilities spanning detection, analysis, decision-making, execution, validation and learning.

Built on a cloud-native, IPv6-based network foundation, Rakuten Mobile’s IP transport network uses Segment Routing over IPv6 (SRv6) with uSID technology, enabling programmable, granular packet processing across the network and providing a modern foundation for advanced autonomous network operations.

The solution encompasses:

• AI-driven fault detection and filtering: OSS receives network alarms and automatically determines whether an event is transient or requires action, reducing unnecessary ticket creation and operational noise.
• AI-powered root cause and solution analysis: When intervention is required, AI agents analyze alarm data, device logs, operational procedures and historical execution results to identify probable root causes and generate multiple potential solutions with confidence scores.
• Intelligent decision-making: A solution decision agent evaluates candidate actions using historical success and failure data and a knowledge graph to determine the appropriate execution plan.
• Automated impact analysis and remediation: Before taking action, the system evaluates potential service impact, including dependencies across network domains. It can then automatically execute corrective actions such as traffic rerouting, interface or port resets and other network configuration changes.
• Closed-loop validation and learning: Following remediation, the system verifies network performance and service restoration, automatically updates incident records and captures root-cause and resolution data to improve future troubleshooting.