The Self-Driving Network: How AI Agents Are Rewiring Global Telecom
The Inside Story of the Race to Automate the World's Largest Machine

About this book:

The global telecommunications network is the largest machine humanity has ever built—1.4 million kilometers of subsea cable, millions of cell towers, and billions of devices all pulsing at the speed of light. It is also, as this gripping insider account reveals, a machine that has finally outgrown its human operators. From midnight pager storms in Network Operations Centers to the geopolitical knife fight between Nokia, Ericsson, Huawei, and the cloud hyperscalers racing to become the planet's digital operating system, *The Self-Driving Network* takes you inside the most consequential technological transformation since the internet itself.

When an AI agent hallucinates in a chatbot, you get a mangled paragraph. When it hallucinates in the telecom core, 911 goes dark, air traffic control loses radar, and banking systems freeze across hemispheres. Drawing on unprecedented access to labs in Espoo, boardrooms in Redmond, and cable-laying ships in the North Atlantic, this book chronicles the high-stakes race to hand the world's nervous system over to autonomous agents—capable of self-healing, self-optimizing, and re-architecting global traffic in milliseconds, without a single human keystroke.

But autonomy brings its own terrors: algorithmic feedback loops no engineer can explain, cyberweapons that evolve at machine speed, and the quiet erasure of an entire workforce built on manual mastery of the dial tone. From digital twins simulating the planetary grid to subsea cables sprouting their own intelligence, from the Open RAN revolution to the green algorithms slashing megawatts at the edge, this is the definitive chronicle of what happens when the most critical infrastructure on Earth wakes up, opens its eyes, and begins to run itself.