what a Level 4 validation covers

There is a row in TM Forum’s autonomous networks taxonomy that rarely survives the journey into a press release. It is labelled applicability. Against Level 4 it reads “select scenarios”. Against Level 5, “all scenarios”.

That single row explains most of the confusion around what operators mean when they announce Level 4. The measurement is not applied to a network. It is applied to a defined job that the network does.

What an autonomous network is trying to solve

An autonomous network is one that watches itself, works out what is going wrong, decides what to do about it and then does it, with less human involvement at each of those stages. 

The reason the industry wants this is unglamorous. Networks have outgrown the number of people available to run them by hand. An operator today manages equipment from several vendors across millions of cells and service configurations, generating more alarms in a day than a control room can meaningfully read, and 5G’s ability to slice a network into separate virtual services multiplies the number of things that need watching and tuning. 

The response has been to hand those judgements to software in stages. It is a coordinated effort rather than a vendor campaign: 95 operators and technology companies have signed TM Forum’s Autonomous Networks Manifesto committing to a shared framework and a common way of measuring progress.

Measuring it in stages is why the framework borrows its shape from self-driving cars. Both scales run from 0 to 5, and both exist for the same reason, which is that autonomy arrives in pieces rather than all at once, and the useful question is always which pieces the machine has taken over. The comparison also heads off the most common misreading. A Level 4 car is not a car without a driver’s seat, and a Level 4 network is not a network without an operations team.

What the levels describe

TM Forum scores five things at each level: awareness of what is happening, analysis of why it is happening, the decision about what to do, the execution of that decision, and the intent that sets the goal in the first place.

At Level 4, the system owns awareness, analysis, decision and execution. Intent stays shared between people and machines, meaning a person still sets the objective and the system works out how to meet it. Only at Level 5 does the system set its own intents. Dell’Oro Group describes the top of the ladder as full automation with no human intervention, which is Level 5 and not Level 4.

The other half of the definition is the scenario. TM Forum’s Level 4 blueprint defines one as a use case combining an operation flow and a network domain, giving fault management on the RAN as its example. Assessment starts by choosing that evaluation object, then scoring it.

What a validated Level 4 looks like

Australia’s NBN Co, with Ericsson, earned the country’s first TM Forum Level 4 validation in June. The scope sits in the announcement: service assurance, single service, in the fixed wireless domain.

The job in question is managing atmospheric ducting, a weather condition in which the atmosphere bends radio signals and degrades fixed wireless performance. Ericsson said the validated system uses an AI agent to turn high-level service intents into executable tasks, monitor performance, predict degradation, isolate the cause across domains, then generate and carry out a fix including automatic rollback, without human intervention in the standard operational flow. All eight capability areas were confirmed at the highest option, giving a validated level of 4.0 for that scenario.

Read against the taxonomy, that is exactly what Level 4 should look like. One operation flow, one domain, a person still setting the objective, and the qualifier about standard flow doing real work in the sentence.

Counting scenarios, counting operators

TM Forum’s June update from DTW Ignite reported 40 validations awarded to 17 operators, with 81% of operators aiming for Level 4 or above by 2030. Its own mission page places most operators between Levels 2 and 3 today, and a TM Forum survey found 21% of respondents operating at Level 3 or above overall, up from 19% the year before.

Those figures do not contradict each other. Validations count scenarios that have reached Level 4. Surveys count operators across everything they run, and an operator with two validated scenarios is still an operator at Level 2 or 3 overall.

Where Asia-Pacific sits

Research firm TeckNexus, tracking 50 operators, puts 60% of the Asia-Pacific operators it follows at advanced autonomy, ahead of other regions, led by coordinated programmes at China Mobile, China Unicom, SoftBank and SK Telecom. The same research found no operator in its sample has removed the human reviewer from exception handling, which is what Level 4 asks for rather than a shortfall against it.

Malaysia has a seat at the table. Digital Nasional Berhad is listed among the champions of TM Forum’s Agentic NOC Catalyst, contributing production network and operations support system data alongside T-Mobile USA, Türknet, Axian and Telefónica, on a project mapped to Level 4 criteria through TM Forum’s open APIs.

Two questions that size any Level 4 claim

Which operation flows and which domain? A validation covers one named combination of the two. Ask which, and ask what runs on the flows either side, because the gap between certified scenarios is where the integration work and the cost still sit.

What sits outside the standard flow? Claims of operating without human intervention almost always carry that qualifier. Ask what counts as non-standard, how often it happens, and who is rostered when it does.

The industry bodies are asking in the same direction. The Next Generation Mobile Networks (NGMN) Alliance said this month that agentic AI needs alignment on trustworthiness, explainability, governance and human oversight before it can scale, with Vodafone’s Luke Ibbetson framing those capabilities as the route to trusted Level 4 autonomy.

The applicability row says select scenarios. So far that is precisely what the industry has delivered, and on schedule.

(Photo by David Arrowsmith/Unsplash)

See also: TM Forum: Telecom operators unprepared for AI safety regulations

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