Building on their work to establish a framework for exploring business-driven use cases, validating proposed offerings and generating practical insights for the wider comms industry, Ericsson and Telstra have entered the next phase of their existing collaboration to focus on exploring how common approaches to network knowledge can support more interoperable, trusted and effective autonomous networks.
The agreement between the operator and leading comms provider was first announced in October 2025, when the two firms said the telecoms industry was facing an urgent need to accelerate autonomy. However, they conceded that the path to fully autonomous networks remains complex, and that achieving this vision meant overcoming technological and operational barriers and aligning on standards.
The initial part of the collaboration set out to explore key component challenges to the adoption of autonomous networks such as fragmented and siloed data, gaps between business intent and execution, the complexity created by multi-supplier and multi-domain environments and the trustworthiness of AI models.
By contrast, the new phase will focus on what Ericsson and Telstra regard as the knowledge, trust and governance foundations needed to support the next stages of network autonomy.
Ericsson said 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.
However, the two firms warned that as operators and suppliers develop their own approaches to the knowledge plane, differences in terminology, structure and levels of trust can create knowledge silos. This, they said, could make it more difficult to exchange and combine knowledge across network domains, suppliers and systems, increasing complexity and limiting progress towards greater autonomy.
To progress this endeavour, the companies have convened a joint working group focused on three key areas of collaboration: developing a common knowledge taxonomy; creating knowledge exchange and composition; and forming knowledge-grounded agency.
Taxonomy work will look to establish an industry-standard approach to classifying knowledge. Knowledge exchange and composition activities will focus on developing common patterns for exchanging and combining knowledge across network domains, supplier sources, structural formats and time, while preserving its lineage and level of trust.
Third, they will explore 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.
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.
Telstra chief architect Mark Sanders said: “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 … 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 and operations support systems at Ericsson, said: “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.”
