- Autonomous is one of the buzzwords at Mobile World Congress 2026
- T-Mobile CTO John Saw applauded Ericsson and Nokia’s collaboration in this area
- Some autonomous network technology already is being used in T-Mobile’s network, alongside AI
MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS 2026, BARCELONA — Earlier this week, Ericsson and Nokia, T-Mobile’s two main infrastructure vendors in the U.S., announced they’re collaborating to advance the path to autonomous networks.
Fierce Network caught up with T-Mobile President of Technology and Chief Technology Officer John Saw at Mobile World Congress 2026 in Barcelona to find out how this new endeavor might affect the Bellevue, Washington-based operator.
It’s a good move, he said, noting that everybody is trying to build autonomous networks and T-Mobile is no exception.
“We think it's going to help with the work we're doing on AI, because then you can actually help with taking the network performance to the next level, like potentially helping with spectral efficiency or different, smarter ways to do interference mitigation,” he said.
Ericsson and Nokia say their new ecosystem reflects a shared focus on championing autonomous networks, something that’s essential for bringing AI and automation into mobile networks. The vision is for autonomous networks to transform deployment, optimization and operations workflows as communication service providers globally seek to achieve and surpass Level 4 autonomy.
T-Mobile’s vision
One of the benefits of going to this model is, ideally, to be able to identify problems before they turn into outages.
“Our vision is to build what we call an intent-based network, and part of building an intent-based network is turning the network into essentially a giant agentic AI platform where everywhere, all the AI agents and every network element work together, collaboratively and adaptively, to optimize network performance,” Saw said.
That involves looking for faults and fixing them – hopefully before the customer sees anything is amiss.
“You'll be able to do upgrades to the network autonomously, without taking the network off air,” he said.
All of this is happening as customers are become more and more demanding. “You just can't have a maintenance window to shut your network down from 2 to 4 in the morning,” he said. “We have fixed wireless customers now,” who expect to have their internet 24/7.
That said, a lot of autonomy already exists in the network today with self-optimizing network technology, where T-Mobile uses AI to autonomously change the coverage pattern when they need to – in response to severe weather events, for example.
When Snowmageddon strikes…
A recent case is Winter Storm Fern, which hit around January 23, 2026. It was one of the largest winter storms to ever hit the United States, with more than 1 million customers losing power.
T-Mobile used its autonomous network – in the form of its AI-based self-organizing network – and made something on the order of 30,000 antenna tweaks for the sole purpose of keeping as many customers connected as possible, Saw said. They also used AI to adaptively power down cell sites when they needed to do so based on battery requirements.
It paid off. Even though Winter Storm Fern was a multi-day natural disaster, 68% of T-Mobile customers were able to reconnect to service within the first hour and 98% of them reconnected in the first eight hours, according to Saw.
“Many of them got their T-Mobile service back before they even got power back,” he said. “That's the power of autonomous network, and we’re doing more and more of that.”
Fierce asked his opinion on five nines, which is an industry standard that calls for a telecom network to be down for no more than about five minutes and 15 seconds a year, something that appears to be becoming an impossible endeavor, by some accounts.
Not according to Saw.
“My position is never let it go down, ever,” he said. “Our customers are not going to forgive us just because of the storm. Our job is to make sure that our customers are always connected, come hell or high water.”
Read all of our coverage from Mobile World Congress 2026 in Barcelona here.