How Swisscom is turning network data into operational intelligence

Network assurance has a data problem

For years, communications service providers (CSPs) have invested in automation to improve network operations, yet despite meaningful progress, many assurance teams still rely on manual operating models and data architectures that were built for a different era.

The challenge is not a lack of data. Modern networks generate enormous volumes of data.  Sometimes too much to make sense of. The harder challenge is turning that data into trusted operational intelligence quickly enough to support modern assurance.

That distinction matters. As networks become more dynamic, assurance can no longer depend on delayed visibility or fragmented tools. Operations teams need to immediately understand what is happening, why it is happening, and which services are affected. They must act before customers feel the impact.

This is why Swisscom's work with Blue Planet is important. Swisscom is advancing a broader operational shift toward real-time, data-driven assurance that can support more automated, proactive, and eventually autonomous network operations.

During a joint session at Upperside World Congress 2026, Swisscom and Blue Planet shared practical lessons from that journey and why real-time data is becoming foundational to the future of network assurance.

From more data to better intelligence

A common misconception in modern assurance is that better operations come from collecting more data. In reality, data only improves outcomes when it is timely, trusted, and placed in operational context. Without this, the result is more storage, more integration work, and more complexity without improving network outcomes.

The challenge is transforming fragmented network and service data into actionable intelligence. That requires a common operational foundation where data is collected, normalized, enriched, correlated, and shared across use cases. It requires context from topology, service relationships, routing behavior, and current network state.

The shift is from data collection to operational intelligence. It is the shift that enables assurance to move beyond reactive monitoring and toward proactive operations.

Swisscom's vision: Treat network data as a product

Swisscom's approach reflects this shift clearly. In its Upperside World Congress 2026 session with Blue Planet, Swisscom describes a journey away from polling-based data collection and toward real-time, push-based telemetry to feed a data mesh and support applications such as a network digital twin.

Central to Swisscom's story is that network data be treated as a product. Data is not just extracted from the network and handed to downstream systems. It must have semantics, freshness requirements, service-level objectives, and trust characteristics that applications evaluate before acting.

For assurance leaders, the message is simple: assurance is only as effective as the data foundation beneath it. If data is delayed, incomplete, or inconsistent, then troubleshooting slows, automation becomes brittle, and AI-driven insights become less reliable.

By treating network data as a product, Swisscom is building an architecture where data quality, availability, and usability support real-time assurance and more advanced operational use cases.

Why real-time data changes assurance

Traditional polling models served the industry for a long time. They gave operators a practical way to collect status and performance information across large networks, but they introduce delays that make it difficult to support real-time network visibility.

Operators like Swisscom need to understand the current state of the network within milliseconds, not after delayed and infrequent query cycles. That requirement changes the role of telemetry. It is no longer just a reporting mechanism. It becomes part of the operating fabric for assurance.

YANG-Push provides a framework for streaming telemetry, centralized data storage, and sharing this unified repository across applications without repeatedly querying devices. Data is collected once and reused across monitoring, analytics, SLA visibility, anomaly detection, and closed-loop operations.

Such a solution reduces the integration tax of onboarding new devices and applications. The assurance environment discovers and uses data more dynamically. The outcome is not just faster data ingestion. The outcome is better response time, faster learning, and improved customer service support.

Turning telemetry into assurance context

Data collection and availability is not the whole story. Assurance value comes from context and correlation.

Telemetry becomes valuable when it is connected to topology, services, routing behavior, and business impact. Context enables assurance teams to move beyond manual swivel chair operations and toward proactive network assurance.

Blue Planet's Unified Assurance and Analytics (UAA) is built around this need for context. UAA brings together fault, performance, service quality, topology, routing, and operational data into a unified assurance architecture. Its data fabric is designed to collect, normalize, enrich, correlate, and distribute operational data across the OSS ecosystem. The Blue Planet knowledge graph preserves relationships among resources, services, topology, routing, and operational events so analytics, AI models, and agents can operate with context rather than isolated data points.

That is the difference between managing data and operationalizing it. For assurance teams, the value is the ability to identify root causes faster, understand service impact more clearly, prioritize actions based on customer and SLA risk, and support workflows that can move from detection to diagnosis to remediation.

From reactive assurance to proactive operations

CSPs want to move from reacting to incidents after they occur to anticipating risk, identifying abnormal conditions early, and resolving issues before service impact.

That transition is supported by the data foundation Swisscom is building. Proactive assurance requires real-time data, trusted context, service correlation, and automation to take actions safely. AI and agentic capabilities are the path forward, but they rely upon accurate operational context and data that reflects network state.

In practical terms, the data fabric foundation must precede automation policies. Before AI can recommend or automate a response, it must see the relevant network state, understand the relationships among resources and services, and determine whether the data is trustworthy.

This is why the move to real-time operational intelligence is so important. It creates the conditions for proactive assurance and autonomous network operations.

Swisscom as a proof point for the industry

Swisscom's network transformation illustrates a broader lesson for the industry. Legacy assurance environments were often built around multiple domain-focused systems and vendor-specific tools that led to manual swivel chair operations. As services become more dynamic and customer expectations rise, those models become harder to scale.

Swisscom selected Blue Planet Unified Assurance and Analytics (UAA) to help modernize its assurance systems and processes into a unified solution. The deployment supports fault, performance, and service quality management across multiple domains, including data center, access, transport and extending to mobile backhaul and business-to-business services. Swisscom also references the need for a modern, cloud-ready assurance solution optimized for dynamic services, closed-loop automation, and improved customer experience.

Swisscom is defining how real-time network data, standards-based telemetry, unified data fabric, and knowledge-driven assurance support the future of network operations.

Their journey demonstrates an important lesson for the industry. As operators pursue agentic AI, and autonomous networking, success depends on creating a trusted operational foundation where data is collected, shared, contextualized, and acted on in real time.

That is why Swisscom's roadmap matters. It shows how real-time streaming intelligence builds the foundation to move assurance beyond reactive monitoring and toward proactive autonomous networks.

Watch the recording of Blue Planet and Swisscom's joint session at Upperside World Congress 2026 below.