SPOTLIGHT
Ground truth is the precondition for autonomous networks — and almost nobody has it Spotlight
We published our first Ground Truth survey this year, in which we polled 500 senior decision-makers across mobile, fixed and fibre operators in the US, Canada and the UK, two-thirds of them in senior management or the boardroom. Those two numbers sit at the heart of what it found. Networks that can route services themselves, predict their own failures and dispatch crews without human instruction have to be making decisions based on a model of what’s in the ground: where cables run, what’s connected to what, etc. If that model is wrong, the automated decisions built on top of it are wrong, too. Autonomy doesn’t tolerate dirty data; if anything, it amplifies errors in it. That’s what makes the gap between the 2030 ambition and the state of current records so striking. The gap between ambition and readiness Only 31% of respondents say they currently have fully or highly autonomous operations, yet 63% expect to get there by 2030. When asked what’s blocking progress, poor data quality, governance and digital twin accuracy sit among the top barriers, alongside siloed data that prevents the intelligent workflow automation autonomous networks depend on.
By David Cottingham CTO, IQGeo
Sixty-three per cent of telecom operators expect to be running fully autonomous networks by 2030. Yet only 13% say their physical network records are accurate and up to date.
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SEPTEMBER 2026 Volume 48 No.3
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