I really enjoyed this conversation with George Glass, chief tech officer at TM Forum, which is spread across two articles, yesterday and today. I never much liked OSS/BSS as a topic, so I hardly jumped at it – except there was a good PR hook line (c/o Babel) about horses and tractors, plus autonomous networks, the top-side of OSS/BSS (telco-IT) reinvention, is on everyone’s lips. It’s why Digital Transformation World in Copenhagen next month will be an ace time for anyone in the telco industry. (Sean Kinney will be there from RCR, so look out for him.)

Anyway, the stories are linked below, and worth a look. And George was candid, taking silly best-of questions in good humour, and telling a story about telcos that is oh-so familiar – from IoT, private 5G, everywhere you look. It is an idea we have discussed in these newsletter blurbs over the last couple of weeks as well, including yesterday, about telcos and teamwork, and how they’ve suddenly (with competitive incentive) stopped picking the fluff out of their belly buttons, and started to look outwards – including at each other, recognising themselves, and making friends.

This is simplistic, but you get the idea: about an industry so entrenched, so self-regarding, so convinced of its own genius that it has lost the battle time and again over two decades as cloud providers, software providers, AI providers have run rough-shod over their expensive infrastructure. It’s (partly) why they have screwed up, to varying degrees, in IoT and private 5G, RCR would argue – and why some have quit the scene, crying about ‘too much hard work’. Which is a way of saying that it takes a village, and telecoms is a kingdom. I’m exaggerating, but that’s the point.

Well George sees some of this, too: telcos are snowflakes (my words); they have to stop “thinking like telco is something special” (his words). But like we have started to see in IoT and private 5G, finally, and like the collaborative telco ventures discussed here yesterday (versus the deep-pocketed D2D community, versus anyone messing with their sovereignty shtick), the industry’s AI conversation is finally growing up. For years, operators have treated automation like a bunch of tricks: a chatbot here, a dashboard there, a maintenance app there.

TM Forum sees a more radical shift: joined-up vendor-agnostic autonomy frameworks, viable in any carrier/vendor configuration, crucially constructed on a totally revamped cloud-native OSS/BSS IT stack. China Mobile is the model; but Orange and Telefónica have the look; and just about every vendor is also painting its face. Or so the story goes. Maybe Copenhagen will tell us (Sean) some more. The question is whether telcos really want interoperability and autonomy – or just random AI theater to cloak their straining silo operations.

James Blackman
Executive Editor
RCR Wireless News

RCR Top Stories

Snowflakes in AI storm: Telcos will never achieve full autonomy or change by layering AI agents onto legacy systems, says TM Forum. Telcos are not special cases, it says. They must rebuild their IT and network foundations first.

Verizon on cyber-design: Verizon made the case at the Defense Communications Forum that military network security is a design choice – tied to how modalities, applications, and more get stitched together.

KDDI eyes AI society: Japanese telco KDDI has unveiled a new three-year strategy focused on AI infrastructure, low-latency connectivity, and future 6G readiness as the operator prepares for what it describes as an AI-native society.

AI drives optical boom: Dell’Oro Group has raised its 2026 optical transport forecast as AI infra spending boosts data center interconnect demand, while supply constraints and longer lead times pressure optical equipment vendors.

Neocloud inference: Neocloud provider Cirrascale discusses its ‘more horses for courses’ strategy is to test and deploy on every leading AI accelerator with bare-metal servers fine-tuned for training, inference, and inference-as-a-service.

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Beyond the Headlines

Adaptive DC reuse: JLL says adaptive reuse is re-emerging as a key strategy for data center expansion, as developers seek faster deployment timelines, existing power infrastructure and lower-carbon alternatives to greenfield construction.

Road to Level 4: Who’s the best at this? “China Mobile.” What about in Europe? “Telefónica and Orange.” And where is the industry, at large? “Between about 1.5 and 2.1.” So how do we get to Level 4, then? TM Forum has the answer.

Dell bets on B2B AI: The line from the first day of Dell Tech World follows the logic about where enterprise AI is headed: distributed, governed, cost-conscious systems that operate close to enterprise data. The next phase is execution.

ISAC for defense: Integrated sensing and comms (ISAC) is a serious defense capability, with industry leaders outlining near-term drone detection use cases, waveform challenges, and a longer 5G/6G roadmap for military networks.

Schulman was right: Why operators are losing the customer relationship, betting on only half the experience, and where they can grab the other half – Alan Minney at MCE Systems has the answer.

What We’re Reading

5G core surges: 5G mobile core network revenue grew at double-digit rates outside China, says Dell’oro Group, whereas in China revenues dropped more severely than any quarter since 5G was introduced to the market.

Private WAN design: Verizon outlines a framework for enterprises to move to private transport, whether via on-prem address translation (NAT), edge-based Verizon-hosted NAT, or a cloud-hosted IP-to-service PrivateLink architecture.

LATAM cable route: TIM-owned Sparkle and Entel Bolivia are to launch a low-latency terrestrial cable corridor linking Peru, Bolivia, and Brazil to improve South American connectivity for gaming, cloud, streaming, and AI services.

Ericsson 5G WAN: Ericsson is repositioning wireless WAN as a core enterprise comms layer, rather than a backup, with new Cradlepoint hardware and NetCloud orchestration to deliver resilience and scalable multi-site network control.

BT unified comms: BT International has a new managed service called UC Edge to simplify enterprise comms by unifying voice, collaboration and number management across multiple platforms – to help multinationals reduce complexity.

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