By: Thomas Board - Pipeline

From groundbreaking AI advancements and next-gen network deployments to major cloud innovations and market-shaping acquisitions, the industry delivered a wave of transformative developments across the communications and IT sectors. 

The month’s top industry news stories are summarized below. To view current breaking news in real-time, visit Pipeline’s News Center, follow Pipeline on social media, or subscribe to receive our weekly industry enterprise and communications technology news summary.

AI and Automation News

Ericsson and AT&T announced that, for the first time, a third-party RAN automation application, an rApp, has successfully performed optimization activity on a Communication Service Provider’s live production network. NTT has developed the world’s first AI technology capable of visualizing expert decision-making processes with approximately 90% accuracy, based on dialogue data from areas such as security incident response and call center operations. Deutsche Telekom has equipped Deutsche Rentenversichung Hessen with an AI-driven voicebot system to enhance efficient and reliable communication with its clients. Deploying the cloud-based Conversational AI Suite enables improvements in service quality and streamlines internal service operations. Orange will deploy OpenAI’s new advanced open-weight reasoning models, ‘gpt-oss-120b’ and ‘gpt-oss-20b’, in its own trusted infrastructure, making customers’ data even safer and meeting the growing demand for sovereign, state-of-the-art AI solutions.

Ciena and Heavy Reading launched a global survey to better understand the impacts of AI applications and traffic growth on metro and long-haul networks operated by communications service providers, including fixed, mobile, and converged network operators and cable operators. Oracle and Google Cloud have expanded their partnership to offer customers access to Google’s most advanced AI models, starting with Gemini 2.5, via Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Generative AI service. Oracle has also deployed OpenAI GPT-5 across its database portfolio and suite of SaaS applications, including Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications, Oracle NetSuite, and Oracle Industry Applications, such as Oracle Health. NEC has developed technology that utilizes AI to enable safe, efficient autonomous control of robot movement even in complex environments with many obstacles.  

NEC’s in-house demonstrations of this technology have confirmed that a robot’s travel time can be reduced by up to 50% when compared to conventional methods. NEC also collaborated with ClimateAi to share that they have developed a conceptual model to estimate the effectiveness of climate change adaptation measures for cocoa and rice cultivation in Africa. 

NVIDIA unveiled NVIDIA Spectrum-XGS Ethernet, a scale-across technology for combining distributed data centers into unified, giga-scale AI super-factories. NVIDIA is also partnering with the U.S. National Science Foundation to create an AI system that supports the development of multimodal language models for advancing scientific research in the United States. Cloudflare shared details regarding powerful new capabilities for Cloudflare One, its Zero Trust platform, designed to help organizations securely adopt, build, and deploy emerging generative AI applications.

Network and Mobile News

Surge has deployed Nokia’s subsea optical solution to connect Jakarta and Singapore. This new subsea network will boost regional data center interconnectivity and support Surge’s mission to expand affordable broadband access to underserved communities across Indonesia. Ericsson has strengthened its partnership with SoftBank through a new commercial agreement covering 4G and 5G network products and solutions. Ericsson has been selected as one of the radio equipment vendors to enhance SoftBank’s networks. Ericsson will enhance SoftBank’s networks in the Hokkaido, Tohoku, Kanto, Hokuriku, and Tokai regions, and parts of the Kansai region. 

AT&T, Ericsson, and 1Finity have reached a major milestone by completing the first Open RAN call using third-party radios at AT&T Labs. This achievement highlights the importance of fostering collaborations to develop open and programmable networks that can significantly transform the telecom industry. Kyivstar, VEON’s digital operator in Ukraine, has successfully conducted a test of satellite and terrestrial network integration using Starlink Direct to Cell technology. This is the first field test of Starlink Direct to Cell in Eastern Europe. GL Communications improved their 5G Service-Based Interface testing solutions, supporting interfaces like N8, N10, N12, N13, N17, N20, N21, N22, N29, and N51 in line with 3GPP Release 17. This scalable solution enables robust emulation and testing of core network functions, whether validating standalone nodes or complete 5G call flows.