The fully automated, ‘self-driving telco network’ is a one of the cornerstones of the next generation mobile vision for many operators, since it would dramatically improve operating costs and quality of service. Applying artificial intelligence (AI) to network management and orchestration (MANO) software could help achieve automation with a high level of intelligence, and a new ETSI ISG (Industry Specification Group) is focusing on this challenge – but warns it will take years to become commercial reality. Densification and the rise of virtualized networks both introduce a huge number of new components into the picture, and this means modern networks are becoming hard for humans to understand quickly. This is the view of Ray Forbes of Huawei, who is the…