UK operator Virgin Media O2 announced plans to begin its 2G network switch-off in Summer 2029, joining rivals BT and VodafoneThree in setting a date to wind down the legacy technology.

Its timeline is similar to that of the country’s other operators, with BT expecting to begin deactivating 2G in May 2029 and VodafoneThree set to turn off its last sites in Spring 2030.

All three operators have signed a voluntary government charter for retirement of the technology. Commitments in that document include undertaking a gradual process starting in trial areas, thorough testing, and work to aid migration of IoT devices supporting “life critical services” which are currently tied to 2G.  

VMO2 noted decommissioning 2G would mean it could switch resources to 4G and 5G, having turned off 3G in 2025.

Advantages cited include redeployment of spectrum resources, cutting energy consumption and generally upping service levels for customers.

The operator reports its 2G network currently carries less than 0.5% of all data used by its customers.

VMO2 CTO Jeanie York said “having recently switched off our 3G network and signed up to the government 2G switch-off charter, we know exactly how to do this responsibly and without disrupting customers. While most customers won’t need to take any action at all, some businesses might need to start planning for this now”.

“We will communicate with customers directly and ensure we support everyone as this essential upgrade takes place.”

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Ericsson unveiled product upgrades and introduced defined business strategies intended to aid operators in their efforts to up network autonomy.

The announcements from the vendor’s Cloud Software and Services division were made at DTW Ignite 2026 in Copenhagen, Denmark today (23 June).

Its main product upgrade is for the Ericsson Intelligent Automation Platform, which is being expanded from being RAN-centric to support core networks. This, it noted, creates a “unified RAN and core network automation” system for operators.

Ericsson promoted the move as accelerating operator autonomous network transformation and aiding efforts to streamline operations, cut costs and “deliver a more resilient and higher performing core network”.

The vendor asserted the “major expansion” makes it the first to introduce the ability to run core-specific automation applications (cApps).

Ericsson is in the process of developing use cases which will become cApps. The initial batch will cover network use cases for resiliency and performance, and service-oriented iterations to provide premium customer experiences.

In another product-specific upgrade, Ericsson announced a data streaming capability in its Network Manager product for online, low-latency, closed-loop automation.

Operator aid.
The company’s second major announcement was the release of “OSS/BSS business value pathways,” strategies it believes provide guidance to help operators achieve automation aims.  

It stated the pathways are part of wider support for network transformation and commercialisation of AI capabilities.

They are said to provide “actionable routes to assured outcomes” and have been created from the vendor’s engagements with global operators, and its own expertise and product range.

Ericsson head of Solution Area BSS and OSS Mats Karlsson said “autonomous network transformation needs to happen now, at speed and at scale, but barriers and complexity present a challenge”.

“The new telco-specific pathways will help CSPs re-draw how they approach their network and IT evolution, helping them to focus on achieving specified outcomes as they accelerate the creation and monetisation of new services, improve overall efficiency and provide customers of all types with ever-improving differentiated experiences”.

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Nvidia and telecom partners including SoftBank Corp and NTT Data plan to demonstrate a stack of data, models, simulation tools and secure runtimes at DTW Ignite 2026, aimed at helping operators move from task-based automation to fully autonomous network operations.

The company argues while generative AI has delivered strong returns in network management, customer care and back-office automation, most of the impact has been limited to speeding up predetermined steps while humans still correlate insights and direct next actions.

Nvidia’s claims automation is now “the launchpad to autonomy” rather than the end goal, with AI agents expected to proactively monitor for problems and coordinate changes across network, IT and business systems while keeping humans in control of policy.

Nvidia cites figures showing 54% of telecom operators view data-related issues as their biggest obstacle to building telecom-specific AI models, largely because the most valuable network and customer data is too sensitive to use directly for training.

SoftBank Corp is tackling the problem by using Nvidia’s NeMo Safe Synthesizer and NeMo Anonymizer tools to generate privacy-preserving synthetic datasets which mirror the structure of real network performance and configuration datasets.

Those datasets are being used to fine-tune its Large Telecom Model (LTM) and build specialised network agents.

On the runtime side, Nvidia stated its NemoClaw blueprints and OpenShell secure runtime are designed to give long-running agents policy-based guardrails and sandboxed access to telecom systems, allowing operators to expand agent responsibilities while keeping behaviour auditable and governed.

NTT Data is applying Nvidia’s open Nemotron models alongside NemoClaw to build agents which track long-term network performance trends and escalate anomalies to specialised research agents for deeper telemetry analysis.

Other partners building on the same framework include: AdaptKey, which is piloting self-healing 5G agents with operators; ServiceNow, which is bringing its Project Arc incident-response tooling to telecom network operations centres; and Tata Consultancy Services, which is developing a multi-fidelity AI sensor architecture for faster anomaly detection.

Simulation is the third pillar of the effort, intended to let agents test recommendations in near-real-time digital environments before acting on live systems.

Software company Forsk stated its GPU-accelerated radio propagation model now achieves ray-tracing-level accuracy up to 200 times faster than CPU-only systems, while Viavi Solutions reports order-of-magnitude gains in RAN simulation throughput after shifting workloads to Nvidia’s RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell GPUs.

KDDI and KDDI Research, working with Nvidia, Keysight and Samsung Research America, are building a high-fidelity RAN digital twin aimed at the 6G era, allowing multiple autonomous agents to simulate scenarios for future radio conditions and traffic shifts.

The TM Forum’s DTW Ignite conference runs 23–25 June 2026 in Copenhagen.

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Eutelsat continued to make waves in maritime connectivity, renewing an agreement with specialist provider AST Networks involving its low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite fleet.

AST Networks already accesses Eutelsat’s LEO birds for its maritime services, so the latest multi-year deal looks to expand on the arrangement by literally growing the amount of satellite capacity used.

It continues a recent run of maritime contracts Eutelsat secured for its OneWeb unit.

The LEO option forms part of a broader connectivity service AST Networks provides to shipping industry customers which Eutelsat stated are increasingly seeking set-ups with high-level performance, resilience and global coverage.

Shipping companies employ such connectivity for staff wellbeing along with operation of their vessels and the running of digital services.

Eutelsat stated the renewed deal is in the multi-million-dollar range. VP of Aero and Maritime Connectivity Thierry Polycarpe said the agreement highlights “the growing demand for LEO-enabled connectivity across the maritime sector”, along with the company’s ability to integrate with hybrid set-ups.

AST Networks CTO Lukasz Latosinski said LEO brings the required level of reliability and low-latency.

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Mavenir unveiled an Agentic Service Assurance Framework designed to automate complex network operations across multiple domains while allowing operators to retain existing infrastructure.

The vendor stated the TM Forum-compliant, multi-agent system combines an intent orchestrator with a layered agentic ecosystem to help detect, diagnose, recommend and resolve network faults faster.

Mavenir positioned the framework as a step toward higher operator productivity and autonomous network operations.

The vendor said network operations across 5G, cloud-native and IP domains are becoming increasingly fragmented and expensive to manage at scale. Traditional assurance systems can identify alarms but often struggle to determine root causes, while the retirement of experienced engineers risks taking years of institutional knowledge out of operations teams.

Multi-vendor environments add another layer of complexity by creating data silos which individual tools cannot easily correlate, according to Mavenir.

At the heart of the framework is Mavenir’s Intent Ops engine, which observes how network operations centre teams work, learns patterns behind successful issue resolution and converts those workflows into repeatable automation templates with explainability and guardrails.

The company explained the workflows are validated against a human baseline before running autonomously, with vetted automations published to an expanding orchestration catalogue.

The framework supports cross-domain monitoring, correlation and root-cause analysis, with closed-loop remediation built on Mavenir products.

It also connects with existing OSS AI agents through the agent-to-agent protocol defined in TM Forum’s IG1453, which Mavenir stated enables operators to preserve prior technology investments while extending automation across the network stack.

Mavenir CEO Pardeep Kohli told Mobile World Live the foundation AI agents are designed to automate 60% to 75% of routine network operations work, to help operators lower costs, improve service quality and reduce the need to train staff on repetitive tasks.

“In a way, you have a kind of personal assistant always watching you, but this personal assistant is for the network,” he said.

Mavenir did not say when it will be available but a representative stated the initial release is being trialled in customer deployments and future feature releases will be delivered through software upgrades.

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