Telstra and Ericsson to co-lead industry group on network knowledge and trust

Telstra and Ericsson will jointly lead a new industry working group on network knowledge and trust, IT Brief Australia reported, after the pair widened their autonomous networks collaboration on 21 October. Autonomous networks hand monitoring, analysis and the execution of changes to software and AI, with people less directly involved. The group is meant to tackle a gap that opens as operators move that way: equipment and software from different vendors and network domains often cannot pass information to each other in a consistent form, so it is harder to judge how reliable that information is before anything is acted on.

Work will cover three areas. The first is a common taxonomy, meaning a shared way to structure descriptions of network knowledge. The second is how that knowledge might be exchanged and merged between systems and domains. The third is how autonomous AI agents can be tied to trusted knowledge and safety guardrails.

The Knowledge Plane sits at the centre of the effort, and the companies describe it as a formal statement of what a network is, what it ought to be and what it is expected to do. It holds engineering rules, policies and guardrails that can be read by both staff and automated systems. Operators and suppliers are each building their own versions, and mismatched terminology, structure and trust levels can produce silos. Those silos make it harder to blend sources, keep track of where knowledge came from and assess its reliability.

On confidence, the group will examine how users and systems can set the weight given to specific knowledge, along with ways of combining knowledge from different vendors, formats and points in time without losing lineage or trust. The companies call the third strand knowledge-grounded agency, and it looks at how agents can draw on trusted knowledge through intent, awareness, analysis, decision and execution. The project follows an earlier framework that dealt with business-led use cases, proposed solutions and practical lessons for telecoms, and the new phase turns to the governance, trust and knowledge structures that higher levels of autonomy require.

Results will be passed to industry bodies including TM Forum, with the intent of informing wider standards discussions and uptake of shared approaches. Mark Sanders, Telstra's Chief Architect, said the aim is to help address foundational challenges and contribute to "more interoperable and dependable network autonomy". Mats Karlsson, head of Solution Area Business & Operations Support Systems at Ericsson, said the expanded collaboration is a chance to "share outcomes with the industry".