• Telstra and Ericsson are expanding their collaboration to accelerate the telecommunications industry’s shift towards autonomous networks

Building on the collaboration announced in October 2025, the next phase of their work will focus on exploring how common approaches to network knowledge can support more interoperable, trusted and effective autonomous networks.

While the existing agreement established a framework for exploring business-driven use cases, validating proposed solutions and generating practical insights for the wider telecommunications industry, the new phase focuses on the knowledge, trust and governance foundations needed to support the next stages of network autonomy.

To progress this work, Telstra and Ericsson will convene and co-lead a joint working group focused on three key areas of collaboration. The working group will publish its outcomes and identify potential follow-on research themes with the view of contributing these findings to industry bodies, including the TM Forum, to support wider industry influence and adoption. 

Autonomous networks depend on a Knowledge Plane: a formal representation of what the network is, what it should be and what it is expected to do. This includes engineering rules, policies and safety guardrails that people and autonomous systems can reason over and act on to deliver intent-based network autonomy.

As operators and vendors develop their own approaches to the Knowledge Plane, differences in terminology, structure and levels of trust can create knowledge silos. This can make it more difficult to exchange and combine knowledge across network domains, vendors and systems, increasing complexity and limiting progress towards greater autonomy.

Telstra and Ericsson will collaborate in three connected areas:

• A common knowledge taxonomy: Working towards an industry-standard approach to classifying knowledge in the Knowledge Plane, including how users and systems determine the level of confidence they can place in particular knowledge before acting on it.
• Knowledge exchange and composition: Developing common patterns for exchanging and combining knowledge across network domains, vendor sources, structural formats and time, while preserving its lineage and level of trust.
• Knowledge-grounded agency: Exploring how grounding autonomous agents in trusted knowledge can support more dependable outcomes across the intent, awareness, analysis, decision and execution cycle.

Together, these areas will be examined by the convened working group, and will support broader industry transformation by improving interoperability, contributing to standards discussions and helping establish a more open and scalable path towards autonomous networks.

Mark Sanders, Telstra’s Chief Architect, says: “Autonomous networks require more than the automation of individual tasks. They depend on a shared understanding of what the network is, what it is expected to do and how much confidence can be placed in the knowledge supporting each decision. By working with Ericsson on common approaches to knowledge and trusted agency, we can help address these foundational challenges and contribute to the industry’s progress towards more interoperable and dependable network autonomy.”

Mats Karlsson, Head of Solution Area Business & Operations Support Systems, Ericsson, says: “The evolution towards autonomous networks will require collaboration across the telecommunications industry. Common approaches to knowledge, knowledge exchange and trustworthy AI will be important to enable autonomous capabilities to operate more consistently across domains and technology environments. Our expanded collaboration with Telstra is an opportunity to explore these foundations, share outcomes with the industry and support the development of more open and scalable approaches to network autonomy.”