03 April 2025

Ian Smith, Head of UKTIN

Driven by globalisation and outsourcing, the UK’s leading position globally in network technology and management has been increasingly challenged over the past few decades.

Our country is now too reliant on technology designed and manufactured abroad, with networks managed in outsourced centres across the globe. As the world moves into a more unstable period, this leaves the UK in a vulnerable position which needs to be addressed.

The telecommunications ecosystem and UK commercial landscape is unrecognisable from even just 25 years ago. This is partly due to the phenomenal growth the industry has undergone, and acceleration in traffic volume, as well as the demand for ubiquitous coverage ‘absolutely everywhere’ for consumers, enterprises, and machines. In turn, this has led to rising expectations for guaranteed quality of service and assured reliability, and trust for industry and public services.

However, today the UK telecoms landscape faces several challenges in meeting these expectations. This includes commercial complexity, with no single provider able to guarantee they can provide the entire physical or logical service truly end to end for their customers.

In addition, the UK telecoms industry is experiencing a shortage of talent with the right STEM skills, with workers in the industry, on average, older than 40, which is also hampering its ability to manage networks.

However, it’s important to note that network performance is not just about the type of technology, be it fixed or mobile, that the user connects to. It’s also about how the networks are managed. This is no trivial matter with the ever-increasing complexity of new ‘G’s’ overlaid on existing networks, which require an ever increasing need to be able to maintain a great customer experience through excelling at network management.

To address these challenges, UKTIN’s Network Management Expert Working Group (EWG) believes the UK government should look to build upon its global leadership in artificial intelligence (AI), bring the industry together by creating industry-specific requirements and standards, and fund research to help develop robust and scalable network management solutions.

Building upon AI leadership

As networks continue to sharply scale to support ever increasing data growth, the world of network management is and will continue to become more and more complex. In critical industries, customers will expect far better service availability than currently offered by the operators. It won’t be acceptable to react to faults, but instead pre-empt issues, route around faults and repair services.

This will clearly require an AI-led approach, necessitating significant data capture and analysis from multiple sources to proactively predict and prevent faults affecting service.

For the UK, this provides a brilliant opportunity to build on its global leadership in AI and address its position in network management.

With networks shifting towards software running on specialised edge microprocessors close to end users or in the cloud, the UK is in a great position to take advantage of this by leveraging its knowledge base in software development, AI and microprocessor design. In addition, the strong academic research within its universities, competitive mobile and fixed networks, as well as its leading-edge service, finance and Net Zero industries, can also play a key role in strengthening its network management capabilities.

As part of this, the EWG has recommended the government facilitate a long-term vision to develop and leverage AI and automation technologies, to help improve and facilitate the management of our increasingly complex telecom networks.

AI training for scalable network management tools

Another key initiative would be to fund research focused on scalable and robust network management tools and datasets. Including real world datasets for AI training, with associated development and test platforms, would make a major difference in developing robust and scalable network management tools.

This could involve government-specific assistance, to incentivise and sponsor the creation of sharing platforms for time series data and large language model datasets, for training new AI services from real-world network data. This recommendation will require the appropriate sponsorship from UK operators, and UKTIN believes both the academic and non-academic world should promote this.

For the UK to regain its global standing in network management, it should back a truly long term, 20-year strategy to help telecommunications enable the modern economy, not just in the automation of network management, but also the facilitation and automation of all industries that will require telecommunications.