2 March 2026: Telstra has reached a key milestone in its journey toward building one of the world’s most advanced autonomous networks by successfully demonstrating an AI-enabled self-healing capability, in collaboration with Red Hat, Dell Technologies and Cisco.
This proof of concept demonstrates a practical framework for how Telstra is approaching network autonomy, showcasing a realistic, agentic AI capability that has been trialled to support future self healing, self optimising and adaptive network operations.
The new capability was successfully demonstrated within a live telco cloud environment to autonomously detect and resolved an unplanned infrastructure outage by shifting critical network applications to healthy hardware in just minutes compared with hours. The result shows how a multi-vendor AI native architecture can enable self-healing operations at scale.
Each company brings a complementary capability to enable this outcome.
Red Hat delivers the cloud native foundation with Red Hat OpenShift in addition to AI- assisted operations with Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat OpenShift Lightspeed across CNF and VNF workloads.
Dell Technologies provides the AI ready on-premises cloud infrastructure and the Dell Telecom Infrastructure Automation Suite (DTIAS) automation layer.
Cisco underpins the high-performance network fabrics with real time telemetry and AgenticOps capabilities for data centre networks through Nexus One’s unified management plane.
Commenting about the achievement, Telstra Executive, Core Networks Executive, David Aders said: “By enabling the network to take action and resolve issues autonomously, we have proven a way to reduce the impact of network outages and keep Australians connected in smarter, more reliable ways.”
In today’s complex telecommunications environments with multiple vendors, diagnosing faults quickly has long been a challenge due to the disparate vendor platforms’ inability to ‘talk’ to each other. By adopting the Model Context Protocol (MCP) together with a Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) framework, and AI agents working in the background, Telstra has effectively removed this barrier and can now connect and interpret data from all these platforms in one place.
This provides teams a single, end-to-end view of what’s happening and offers smart, context-aware recommendations to accelerate fault resolution.
David Aders added: “Together, these capabilities show the network can begin to manage, protect and optimise itself – reducing downtime, improving resilience and preparing Telstra for a future where the network dynamically and autonomously responds to customer intent and service needs.”
This work is a key enabler of Telstra’s Connected Future 30 strategy and aligns to the Telstra Reference Architecture Model (TRAM) - Telstra’s blueprint for how all technology should be designed and connected, ensuring every product, system and service is built in a consistent, standardised and future-ready way.
By embedding agentic AI capabilities into Telstra’s Telco Cloud Infrastructure, Telstra is laying the groundwork for a network that can observe and analyse the infrastructure conditions, predict, prevent, and autonomously resolve issues, optimise resource allocation across multivendor environments and continuously improve resiliency and performance at scale.
In collaboration with Red Hat, Dell Technologies and Cisco, Telstra is building the underlying intelligence required to introduce advanced automation in its network.
Telstra media contact:
Name: Steven Carey
Mobile: +61413988640
Email: media@team.telstra.com
Media reference number: 002/2026
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