2026 promises to be a pivotal year across four key technologies in the mobile core — AI, edge access, disaster protection, and non-terrestrial networks
When T-Mobile US launched the world’s first nationwide 5G Standalone (5G SA) network in 2020, followed by telecommunications providers around the globe, it ushered in a new era of connectivity. Today, the industry’s embrace of 5G SA continues to evolve, particularly in the hunt for profitability.
Drawing from extensive industry discussions with customers, partners, and experts, 2026 promises to be a pivotal year across four key technologies in the mobile core — AI, edge access, disaster protection, and non-terrestrial networks — alongside the ongoing maturation of several more trends.
Here’s what to expect.
Artificial intelligence and the mobile core
Two angles to consider are how AI enhances the mobile core and how the mobile core enhances AI.
In the mobile core, look for an emphasis on self-X (optimization, efficiency, healing, etc.) to impact areas such as charging, traffic routing and resilience.
- Charging: Creating charging offers (for measuring usage, setting prices, and generating bills) is a complicated process, typically requiring days, weeks, or even months. Generative AI optimizes rule creation for these kinds of rules-based processes, enabling an accelerated time-to-market advantage.
- Traffic routing: The mobile core continually requires optimized traffic routing in response to external demands, scaling, and maintenance, among other factors. Agentic AI enables a set of cloud-native network functions (CNFs) to autonomously adjust traffic based on the declared goals.
- Resilience: A particular CNF instance might become degraded or go out of service. Agentic AI enables resilience at the CNF level by autonomously triggering self-healing actions, such as shifting the traffic load within a set of CNFs.
Enabling AI for core will require introducing localized capabilities that integrate intelligence where it delivers measurable value. This includes leveraging emerging AI-native interfaces such as model context protocol (MCP) and agent-to-agent (A2A) protocols to facilitate seamless interaction and adaptability. At a higher level, an AI-enabled autonomous network layer will aggregate insights from across the network, applying intelligence to support advanced “core self-X” use cases.
Turning our perspective outward, the mobile core needs to enhance its support for AI as a new class of traffic. Unlike well-behaved voice calls and video streaming, AI brings new types of traffic to the network. This traffic is bursty, more uplink-intensive, and situationally vital in requiring ultra-reliability and bounded low latency to ensure accuracy and safety in the physical world. An immediate practical opportunity is for telcos to serve AI’s increasing demands by using their mobile core edge deployments (perhaps with high-performance appliances) to serve as local breakouts for AI data centers.
Edge access solutions
Edge access is gaining momentum. Initial core implementations move the user plane function (UPF) out of the data center and into the enterprise. The benefit stems from local breakout (LBO), as recently announced by T-Mobile US in its Edge Control solution. Optimized traffic, reduced latency and enhanced security all result from shortened data paths and keeping traffic on the enterprise premises.
Intriguingly, roaming as a service can ease telco and enterprise efforts to implement roaming. Instead of traditional 3G-visited networks and 4G home-routed roaming, the combination of edge access and core SaaS enables telcos and enterprises to subscribe to roaming as a service.
Disaster protection
For a long time, network cores have been implemented as geo-redundant, providing protection against site failures. Yet networks are increasingly vital and require an extra layer of protection. Thanks to industry’s embrace of cloud-native technology, it’s becoming possible to achieve added protection, on demand, by rapidly deploying in the cloud, then quickly rehoming access and connections.
Satellite non-terrestrial networks
Satellite non-terrestrial networks (NTN) will move increasingly into focus throughout 2026, with the industry immediately ready for data and IoT, followed by voice-enablement based on 3GPP R17. NTN can fill coverage gaps and help new entrants become telcos without a terrestrial RAN build or MVNO relationship. It can also become a central element of 5G core private networks, particularly for public safety and defense purposes.
Furthermore, NTN can enable universal IoT and direct-to-device (DTD) connectivity by integrating IoT devices directly with satellites for a global RedCap IoT service. It can enhance network resiliency for outages and extend slicing globally, enabling “anywhere experiences” instead of familiar home- and visited-coverage services.
Ongoing trends to watch in 2026
Automation: The focus will shift to Git- and Intent-based operations for Day 0 and Day 1. Equally, the industry is moving to automated in-service update and upgrade management for Day 2. From there, attention is expected to expand toward Day 2 automated configuration and even design changes for the mobile core.
Security: Key topics include regulations, data sovereignty, privacy, vulnerability management, further role-based access controls, certificate management, and edge detection and response (EDR). From an engineering perspective, EDR is a fascinating technology that integrates security software within a core’s network function, enhancing security without impacting the network function’s kernel, capacity or performance.
Network slicing: A few telcos and enterprises use slicing in live commercial services. However, with the maturity of 5G SA and OSS, the industry will increasingly move from initial, mostly static use cases and deployments toward slicing’s dynamic usage for on-demand use cases, leveraging fully automated management throughout all lifecycle stages of a slice.
5G-Advanced: Keep an eye on this technology as it continues to transform 5G Standalone core’s fast connectivity and cloud-native, service-based architecture into an intelligent, efficient, and resilient system, ready for further value creation. It will introduce new possibilities such as true end-to-end dynamic network slicing, authentication exposure, native support for satellite NTN, and advanced capabilities for IoT, including enhanced RedCap and ambient IoT. These are complemented by architectural enhancements toward an autonomous core, further pushing the envelope in efficiency, resiliency (including post-quantum cryptography), and preparedness for an AI-native future.
Summing up, the prediction is that, during 2026, the industry’s service providers, enterprises, and vendors will progress toward achieving smarter, more efficient mobile cores that enable the pursuit of new revenue streams through automation, security, resiliency, and AI.
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