Network Automation Expected First, With AI Following
The message that carriers give to his company “over and over again” is “hands off the network,” emphasizing the importance of removing human control through automation, Sterling Perrin, Heavy Reading's senior principal analyst-optical networks and transport, said during a Light Reading webinar on Thursday. As networks become more automated, the use of AI in managing networks will increase, experts suggested.
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Eventually, AI, which differs from automation in that it involves “mimicking human reason and thinking,” will help carriers analyze large amounts of data and make predictions about the network, Perrin said. Most providers “are ... in the early phases of partial automation … but with very big ambitions to move to really advanced stages.”
The goal of completely automated, or “self-driving” networks, may prove “unachievable,” warned Moran Roth, director-product management at Juniper Networks. But automation remains critical to addressing “increasing network complexity, skill shortages” and enhancing network agility, he said. Providers should focus on problems they want solved, he said. “Without ... focus, you will be shooting in the dark.”
Operators want to improve efficiency by increasing the speed of completing “repetitive tasks,” reducing human error and avoiding truck rolls, Roth said: Automating the addition of network services or upgrading software “can contribute to achieving these outcomes.” Carriers also want improvements in network performance and capacity, which may require automation, he said. However, "without an automated, active assurance solution you cannot be sure of the service quality your customer is getting until the customer complains.”
Carriers are pushing automation because customers are demanding more advanced communications services, said Oscar Gonzalez de Dios, expert-technology and planning at Spanish provider Telefonica. Customers “want connectivity, but they also want lower latency,” he said. Technology is also becoming more complex, he added. “From year to year, one application is the king and then another, so we change everything.”
Lumen emphasizes “keeping customers at the center of everything we do,” said Greg Freeman, vice president-network and customer transformation service assurance. “We want our connectivity to be very quick, very secure and very effortless,” he said. Lumen decided a few years ago that by 2025 all of its interactions with customers would be “machine-to-machine driven.”
Automation is unavoidable because while networks and infrastructure continue growing, for most network operators the number of employees remains stagnant, Freeman said. “If we want to maintain that high level of resiliency, lower human-error outages and just be more efficient … we knew we had to move to an automated strategy,” he said. Lumen has "put a lot of time and effort ... into diagnostics, keeping the network running," he said: "That's how we make money."
AI can predict bandwidth demand during a big event like the broadcast of the Super Bowl or streaming a Taylor Swift concert, and help a carrier add capacity at the right time using the right links, Roth said. It can also help detect a deviation from normal network operations, and suggest the probable "root cause" of a problem, based on learning from previous incidents, then “recommend remediation steps, for example replacing hardware, changing configuration or rerouting traffic.” Initially, AI will be a “co-pilot,” but as operators get more confident, it can implement changes without human interaction, he predicted.