OpenAN project aims to enable O&M agent collaboration in autonomous networks

Oh, marvellous — another open-source project to save telecoms from themselves. China Mobile, the GSMA, and Huawei have given us OpenAN, a framework for O&M agent collaboration that aims to drag networks kicking and screaming to Level 4 autonomy. Because Level 3, which still requires a human to occasionally push a button, was apparently failing to impress the shareholders who've been waiting for a true 'self-healing' network since the 1990s.

Of course, this is the same industry that promised us 5G would revolutionise everything and then delivered slightly faster Netflix and a lot of hype about edge computing. Now they want us to believe that self-healing, self-optimising networks are just around the corner, powered by open-source code that anyone can contribute to — as if the telecom standards bodies haven't spent decades making sure even the simplest interoperability takes years to agree upon. The involvement of Huawei, a company currently banned from much of the Western telecom supply chain, adds a lovely geopolitical twist: nothing says 'global collaboration' like a sanctioned giant leading the charge while its competitors eye it nervously.

Still, the open-source nature of OpenAN means anyone with a decent IDE can help debug the inevitable catastrophic failure when two agents decide to simultaneously re-route traffic through the same node, sparking a cascade that brings down a city's mobile network. The project's goal of Level 4 autonomy, where human oversight is minimal, is ambitious — probably because the actual humans who currently keep networks running are a costly line item that operators would love to eliminate.