- For Telstra International, autonomous network design is compressing service delivery timelines from months to days
- A single OSS/BSS inventory platform is foundational to scaling subsea and terrestrial services together, Telstra told Fierce Network
- The operator said open APIs and industry standards are key to determining whether autonomy works across carrier boundaries
The idea of autonomous networks has been floating around the telecom industry for years. But AI-driven demand for capacity is forcing operators to move from theory to execution.
That's true for Telstra International, whose customers are no longer ordering bandwidth in incremental steps. They are buying in terabits and often do not know where that capacity will be needed next, according to Regan Ireland, global head of pre-sales solution, Products and Digital Experiences at Telstra International, who spoke with Fierce on a call from his home office in Singapore.
“We’ve got customers where five terabits is now their minimum buy quantity,” said Ireland. “Two years ago, those kinds of numbers were unheard of.”
To cope with that volatility, Telstra International has focused on making its network far more "fungible," he noted. Network capacity is pre-deployed across subsea and terrestrial infrastructure, with licenses that can be shifted dynamically to meet demand. Instead of engineering every new circuit manually, the company is moving toward system-driven design and deployment.
At the center of their effort is an BSS/OSS transformation built on Blue Planet and then customized for Telstra's needs. The platform merges subsea, optical and IP network inventories into a single system that can identify viable paths across its entire footprint. That allows engineers and sales teams to move from conceptual design directly to automated deployment. What used to take 60-70 days can now take about a week for building and testing, according to Ireland.
"We've also been able to improve our forecasting," he noted. "We are better able to predict demand for 12 to 18 months and turn it up quickly."
An SD‑WAN‑like experience for subsea and optical services
“The biggest change is that we can now ask the system to find a path from A to B and identify every physical and logical resource that will be consumed,” Ireland said. “The next step is pushing that design straight into the network automatically.”
The result is a customer experience that, while grounded in infrastructure like subsea cables and optical networks, starts to resemble the simplicity of SD‑WAN. Customers define what they need, and the network adjusts, said Ireland.
“That’s exactly what we want it to feel like,” Ireland said. “An SD‑WAN-like experience, but for subsea and optical services.”
Why open APIs and ecosystem partnerships matter
Autonomy, however, does not stop at Telstra’s own network boundaries. Because international connectivity is inherently multi-operator, Telstra International is working closely with TM Forum and Mplify initiatives to help standardize open APIs for quoting, ordering and service assurance.
“No carrier is an island,” Ireland said. “The real value comes when we can deploy services seamlessly across each other’s networks.”
Satellite connectivity also plays a growing role in this strategy. Telstra International works with partners including SpaceX and OneWeb, integrating satellite services for enterprise access, remote backhaul and resilience.
In the future, satellite links could even provide temporary backup capacity when subsea cables are impaired, Ireland said.