Vodafone Demos AI Digital Twin for Network Testing

This initiative is part of Vodafone's broader "Tech 2025" strategy to automate its pan-European network. The company has previously developed a digital twin of its UK mobile mast network with Esri and AWS, mapping over 40 million environmental features like buildings and trees to optimize its 5G rollout. The key innovation with Cirrus360's Gabriel™ platform is its "declarative" nature, using AI reasoning to *predict* future outcomes. Unlike a simple replica, it can forecast potential hardware failures, customer traffic, and latency at a 5G RAN site before any equipment is physically installed or upgraded. This predictive capability is critical for the industry's shift to Open RAN, which relies on integrating hardware and software from multiple vendors. Multi-vendor integration is a primary challenge for Open RAN adoption, creating complexities in testing, operations, and maintenance. The platform's development builds on a prior collaboration between Vodafone, Cirrus360, and Intel that created the RAN Domain Specific Language (RDSL). RDSL acts as a common language framework to automate how software runs across different hardware, a key hurdle in creating interoperable Open RAN systems. This project is backed by funding from the US Department of Commerce's National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) via the Public Wireless Supply Chain Innovation Fund. The fund specifically targets the development of new testing methods to assess the interoperability and performance of open networks. The move toward AI-driven digital twins reflects a larger industry trend, with the global AI in telecommunications market expected to grow at a CAGR of 32.6% from 2025 to 2034. The ultimate goal is to enable autonomous networks that can self-configure, self-heal, and self-optimize without human intervention.