How Digital Twins are Powering Network Transformation

This Industry Viewpoint was authored by Kailem Anderson, Vice President, Global Products & Delivery, Blue Planet

Communications Service Providers (CSPs) face daunting complexity as networks evolve to support the transformation to 5G, fiber, and cloud-native platforms. Technical transformation across IP and optical layers, virtualization, combined with surging service expectations leave little room for downtime or inefficiency. Traditional planning and monitoring tools and reactive operations are no longer fit for purpose.

Enter digital twins. At their core, digital twins are live, virtual models of a service provider’s network. Unlike legacy network simulations, modern digital twins are continuously updated with real-time telemetry from every layer—IP, optical, access, edge, cloud, and more. This hyper-accurate mirror of the operational network isn’t a static reference; it’s a dynamic environment for experimentation, diagnosis, and automation.

Through digital twins, CSPs gain comprehensive visibility, control, and the unprecedented ability to anticipate and shape network evolution and behavior. They can simulate and validate changes before pushing them live, reducing outages and accelerating innovation. When network anomalies arise, CSPs are empowered to virtually “rewind” time, replaying the exact circumstances leading up to issues such as flapping routes or transient congestion. This sharply reduces mean time to resolution, replacing log reviews with precise evidence across integrated network domains.

Building the foundation for IP digital twins

To unlock these benefits, CSPs must first establish a solid foundation, one capable of supporting an accurate, real-time digital replica of the IP network. Deploying an IP digital twin is not plug-and-play; it requires strategic alignment across IP network, data, and processes. CSPs must design for openness—cloud-native, API-driven platforms that seamlessly ingest and correlate data across multi-vendor, multi-domain environments. Only with unified and federated data models can IP digital twins realize their promise, serving as the launchpad for both agentic AI and autonomous operations.

A digital twin’s sophistication is bounded by its data. Unified and federated data models are crucial—they break down historic silos between IP network elements, domains, and operational tools. For an IP digital twin, that means federating routing tables, interface metrics, flow records, and streaming telemetry into a centralized, open model that reflects the real-time network state.

This unified model does more than support fault finding or root cause analysis. It provides the rich, cross-domain data foundation next-generation AI needs to predict, optimize, and automate IP network behaviors. An IP digital twin becomes the launchpad for agentic AI and, ultimately, autonomous network operations.

From reactive to proactive: AI-empowered operations

Once the right data foundation is in place, CSPs can begin to apply AI in more meaningful ways. A well-fed IP digital twin creates the ideal environment for intelligent systems, such as agentic AI, that can not only observe the network’s behavior but respond to it automatically and in real time.

The true value of an IP digital twin emerges in moving network operations from reactive to proactive by empowering autonomous operations. This is where agentic AI, embedded within an IP digital twin solution, takes center stage. Agentic AI agents are designed to interpret, decide, and act on IP network data with little or no human intervention.

For instance, when early signs of routing congestion or link degradation are detected, AI agents within the digital twin can simulate a range of corrective actions such as configuration optimization, node protection, peering, new links and nodes. They evaluate outcomes against real-world baselines within the IP twin and automatically deploy the optimal change to the live network. These agentic systems continuously learn from every simulated incident, operational change, and real-world outcome, enhancing accuracy and agility over time.

The result is a living, learning model of the network – one where AI and real-time telemetry work hand in hand to enable faster decisions, smarter automation, and a more resilient digital infrastructure.

Monetizing and managing networks at scale

IP digital twins are far more than operational efficiency tools—they are engines for innovation and revenue growth across the telecom value chain. By leveraging the real-time, holistic insights that digital twins provide, CSPs can tap into entirely new monetization models while confidently meeting the ever-increasing demands of both consumers and enterprises.

With an IP digital twin, CSPs gain a sandbox for rapid service innovation. They can model and test new services—such as 5G slice ultra-reliable low-latency tiers for streaming, conferencing, gaming, etc., prioritized connectivity for enterprise applications, or high-speed bandwidth-on-demand —before they are launched in the live environment. These target market trials simulate real-world network conditions, enabling CSPs to fine-tune both technical performance and pricing strategies. This agility means faster rollouts and the ability to quickly adapt or retire offerings based on changing demand.

The IP digital twin’s granular view of routing paths, network demand and resource utilization enables personalized, usage-based pricing models that were impractical with static or siloed operational data. For instance, CSPs can offer “5G network slicing”, charging content providers or enterprises for guaranteed bandwidth or latency for critical applications. The ability to dynamically allocate—and bill for—resources in near real time opens significant new revenue streams.

What’s more, traditional capacity planning is often hampered by uncertainty and the risk of over- or under-provisioning. Digital twins shift this dynamic entirely. CSPs can run tailored “what if” scenarios to understand the impact of unforeseen events, such as major sporting fixtures, content drops, or viral social moments. By precisely modelling demand spikes at the IP network layer, CSPs are better prepared to offer premium, event-specific connectivity packages—ensuring a flawless end-user experience and maximizing returns during peak moments.

IP digital twins help CSPs to transform not only network performance and monetization but also efficiency and sustainability. Proactive AI-driven optimization application can effectively cooperate with IP digital twins to explore energy efficiencies —rerouting traffic away from power-hungry paths, scaling down underutilized infrastructure during off-peak times, and predicting equipment failures in advance to minimize wasteful site visits. Each of these benefits translates directly to lower costs and reduced environmental impact.

The path forward

The telecommunication landscape is reaching an inflection point. Networks must become smarter, faster, and more flexible—proactively anticipating shifts in demand, responding to issues and opportunities in real time, and monetizing new services at scale. IP digital twins, underpinned by unified and federated data models and empowered by agentic AI, are the foundation of this new era. CSPs who invest in these technologies today will not only meet the demands of tomorrow—they will shape what the future of telecom looks like.

As network automation matures, IP digital twins evolve from passive observers to active collaborators—learning, predicting, and enacting changes. In Blue Planet-supported environments for instance, where IP digital twins are seamlessly integrated with agentic AI, CSPs are evolving beyond basic automation toward truly autonomous networking.

Kailem Anderson is Vice President of Global Products & Delivery for Blue Planet, a division of Ciena. His responsibilities include global ownership of Product Management, Engineering, Delivery, Support and Partner Ecosystems for Ciena’s Software business (Blue Planet). In this capacity, he leads a team of more than 700 employees, to drive the vision, direction, execution, delivery and profit & loss of the Blue Planet suite of products into the Telecommunications market segment. Well-established in the networking industry for over 20 years, Kailem has held various leadership positions at Cisco, IBM, and Microsoft, where he focused on introducing new technologies to market in the areas of networking, security, data center, automation and SaaS.

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Categories: Industry Viewpoint · SDN · Software · Wireless