Reshaping network as a product for partners and customers

Telstra wants to reposition its network as a product, making it easier to customise and distribute services across different types of partners while supporting its core products.
This shift was due to the complexity and demand on telecom networks, which made managing and monetising them a challenge, said Telstra group executive for product and technology Kim Krogh Andersen at the Digital Transformation World (DTW) 2025 conference held in Denmark from 17-19 of June.
Andersen spoke about the need to use network intelligence to drive innovation and scalable business models during his executive keynote speech.
“Over the past few years, we’ve made bold decisions to radically simplify and digitise our core business,” he said. “We removed our back book, excess fees, lock in contracts and we stopped subsidising handsets.
“At the same time, we invested in our network leadership and underlying technology to maximise value for our customers.”
He said this allowed Telstra “to improve our returns and we are performing well against global peers. At the same time, we believe there is more growth potential with these underlying industry trends”.
According to Andersen, today’s telco business model is static and is mostly best effort across the board.
“The customers experience depends on many network attributes like security, resiliency, downlink, uplink, jitter [and] latency and still we mostly define network success based on speed and coverage,” he said.
“With AI agents, 8K streaming, cloud gaming and other sophisticated use cases, it will be more difficult to keep building a network that caters for these demands and at the same time increase commercial returns.”
To operate the network as a product, Andersen said Telstra must have reusable capabilities and attributes that can be configured and distributed through different channels. This includes existing direct businesses, mobile virtual network operators, original equipment manufacturers, over-the-top services and systems integrators via aggregator platforms like Aduna.
“At Telstra, our consumer, business and enterprise segments are the fundamental channels to market today,” he said. “We want to ensure they get the products and attributes needed to serve their end customers in the best possible way.”
Network as a product will enable Telstra to change how it structures its plans and propositions, he said.
It will allow the telco to move beyond download speeds and data buckets to more tangible network attributes.
“We believe this change will improve our differentiation and grow connectivity revenue, through improved plan mix, in all our segments,” Andersen said. “Enterprise customers value and expect programable interfaces.
“They are moving away from digital portals to API driven engagements, similar to the way they interact with hyperscalers for compute and storage.”
One of Telstra’s first network as a product offering for enterprise will be its reimagined adaptive networks centre, which is launching soon.
“This will reshape how our enterprise customers engage with us,” said Andersen. “Built entirely on our TRAM [Telstra Reference Architecture Model] framework and powered by the TMF Open Digital Architecture, this product allows customers to configure, adap, and evolve their networks in real time.
“In parallel to our consumer, business and enterprise segments, we can see new opportunities.”
Andersen admitted that Telstra has struggled to monetise specialised network attributes like gaming quality of service, machinery quality of service, location and fraud, among other characteristics, in “today’s direct model”.
The telco’s aggregation platforms such as Aduna and local platforms like Telstra.dev will be a more suitable channel to market for some of these network attributes, noted Andersen.
“The change in business model and how we bring network attributes to market is in our control,” he said. “What is not in our control is whether we can make the global playbook work.
“The industry track record here is not great, but at the same time, we believe it’s an inflection point.”
The network is becoming programmable, many customers are global, and there is a commercial vehicle in place, like Aduna, said Andersen.
These shifts come as customers need for technology and connectivity become sophisticated, according to Telstra group executive of global network and technology Shailin Sehgal’s speechTelstra’s Evolution: Disrupting with Autonomous Networks, which was also presented at DTW 2025.
He said Telstra was working towards its five-year Connected Future 30 strategy, “a bold reimagining of how” the telco designs and delivers its core product, its network.
The resulting evolution of this network is Telstra’s Autonomous Network (TAN), which Sehgal added is a network that is “self-healing, self-optimising and dynamic when it comes configuring itself to deliver the experience intended by the customer”.
“As we look to the future, AI and cloud are driving the next evolution of technology,” he said.
AI is reliant on a distributed cloud, and depending on the use case, it needs to be connected closer to where it’s being used, noted Sehgal. The technology also needs low latency access to data on a high-capacity network.
“We’re setting our network up to lead this change,” he said. “The network will continue to be more software defined, programmable and opensource for AI to execute in real time, allowing both the machines and the network to continuously learn and improve from each interaction.”
He said Telstra was moving away from manual network planning, build, optimisation and operations to an adaptive, autonomous and responsive network that meets real time customer needs.
“With the advancements in agentic AI, the potential to apply this into the network is even more exciting,” explained Sehgal. “Think about AI agents as embedded in autonomous networks; they are the modular tools to reason and take action on specific tasks.
“They’re narrower in focus than the full network – one agent may manage predictive maintenance; another agent may manage dynamic resource allocation or customer support.
“They coexist and collaborate with each other, each fulfilling a defined role within the broader ecosystem.”
However, the telco wasn’t there yet and firstly needed to define the architectural, implementation and deployment patterns for designing and scaling agents, note Sehgal.
“We need to ensure its reasoning is highly accurate, explainable and predictable in the network,” he said. “This is a key focus getting reasoning up to scratch before we can have the confidence to allow agents to then autonomously act on that reasoning.
“This isn’t something that we each should tackle in isolation.”
During his speech, Sehgal pointed out that industry collaboration remains critical to our shared success in driving innovation and delivering autonomous networks with agentic AI.
“We’re working closely with TM Forum and our peers to shape the maturity model that defines what autonomy means in an autonomous world,” he said.
During DTW 2025 Telstra won a TMF Award for the third consecutive year, highlighting its strategy for excellence in customer experience.
The telco’s entry explored its Adaptive Networks Case Study Autonomous Networks to demonstrate its global leadership with TRAM and Product Experience (PEX).