
Greenfield automation is not the reality for most operators
When it comes to the transition to Level 4 automation, it would be nice to have the luxury of building a network from scratch – for example, a 5G private network that is isolated from any other infrastructure. In that case, it may well be a relatively easy task to reach L4 and L5 (according to the TM Forum automation scale) and fully autonomous operations. Unfortunately, that is a luxury afforded to very few. In reality, today’s networks are a complex hybrid of multiple generations of fixed and mobile technologies – 2G, 3G, 4G, and 5G, and so on – over a mix of copper, DSL and fibre infrastructure, with