Orange maps country-specific course to network autonomy

Several telcos view autonomous networks (AN) adoption as important to enabling new business models and future services. But the journey to AN requires careful planning, especially if, like Orange, you are rolling it out across 25 countries and business units.

Orange, which is one of the founding members of TM Forum’s autonomous networks project, has committed to achieving TM Forum’s Level 4 Autonomous Networks (AN) by 2025, one of few operators to do so along with AIS, China Mobile, MTN and Telefónica. It has also endorsed TM Forum’s AN Manifesto. It believes AN will help it become a platform player, make use of network APIs, and ultimately offer more differentiated and on-demand services using capabilities such as network slicing.

“Orange’s ambition is … to move towards telco-as-a-platform and the API-zation of the network. With the introduction of 5G SA we are also evolving towards offering more mobile private networks with network slicing, dynamic slicing and all these requires management of complexity,” according to Emmanuel Chautard, Orange Innovation Networks, Senior Vice President, Operations and Networks Economics, who was speaking at TM Forum’s Autonomous Network Summit, held during MWC24.

As a multinational operator Orange, however, is having “to customize the journey to each country, and each business unit,” explained Chautard.

Today the company stands at "approximately" level two of AN and is progressing towards level three, which involves introducing alarm filtering, as well as new root cause analysis and monitoring capabilities, according to Chautard. Attaining level four of AN change and fault management by 2025, meanwhile, will entail introducing intent and the capability to perform closed loop … capacity planning.

Localization

However, the need to create end-to-end processes means Orange has to customize its approach on a country-by-country basis.

“The starting points are different per country. So, we need to look with each country at the most promising use cases, the highest return on investments which are possible to reach, … the low hanging fruits and the tradeoffs.”

Orange deployed a taskforce of experts to identify each country’s point of departure, perform a gap analysis and then define an action plan.

“By the end of the year, we have assessed almost all 25 countries and business units and we have started to build a plan for next year,” said Chautard.

At the same time, Orange has been continuing automation work as it moves towards its 2025 goal.

“Of course, this is not sequential, we have not stopped all automation because … [we are pursuing ] acceleration. So, we manage both short term and long term view[s] with the level four and the risk progress which is done every day.”

Cloud-native on-boarding

As networks become more software-based, cloud-native and data-driven, Orange also wants to be able to “visualize the infrastructure layer of the telco cloud,” according to Chautard.

The company has developed what it calls a network integration factory (NIF) to test and validate technical chains, as well as the performance of end-to-end services. The NIF will help Orange onboard cloud-native network functions across different geographies, which will then then managed by centralized network operation centers (NOCs), said Chautard.

"It's very federated with the countries but also with the vendors and partners."

Orange, however, does not expect the move to cloud-native networks to be rapid, based on its experience of network virtualization.

“Network virtualization was long term, and we expect cloud native to take some time. Nonetheless, “it's really important especially with new upcoming opportunities such as 5G standalone and core network functions.”