The race to 6G is accelerating, with implications that extend far beyond the next generation of connectivity. 6G is being designed for an AI-driven world, where autonomous agents will make decisions, take action, and interact with the network at a scale and speed never seen before. Autonomous machinery, factory robots, drones, and new healthcare applications will all depend on networks that can sense, respond, and make decisions in real time.
6G will be the connective tissue that AI depends on, linking the cloud, autonomous systems, the edge, and critical infrastructure. That raises an important question: how do you trust a network that increasingly makes decisions and adapts on its own?
The answer starts with assurance
The European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) has highlighted security and assurance as key considerations in developing 6G. Ultan Mulligan, Chief Services Officer at ETSI, noted, “We need confidence and assurance in the quality of AI systems and in how the underlying data is managed.” That means going well beyond checking whether the network is up or down. Assurance must show whether the network behaves as expected, whether services meet their commitments, and whether autonomous systems can be trusted to act on the information they receive. That connects it directly to another defining requirement of 6G: resilience.
Resilience needs visibility
Writing in IEEE Spectrum, Mehdi Bennis describes resilience in 6G as anticipating the unanticipated: adapting, recovering, and withstanding both known and unknown stressors, from node failures and outages to misinformation. The GSMA 6G Community similarly highlights robust operation, seamless recovery from failures, and scalable deployment in cloud-native environments.
As PP Foresight founder and analyst Paolo Pescatore told The Register, “the priority is to embed security, resilience, interoperability, and supply-chain diversity from the outset.” However, operators cannot build resilience on assumptions. You cannot adapt to what you cannot see, and assurance helps operators ensure resilience is embedded from day one.
From monitoring the network to understanding it
Assurance has long been recognized as a critical foundation for next-generation networks, a view reinforced by analysts and research as the industry looks toward 6G. IDC identifies service assurance as the top automation priority for EMEA operators in 2026. Similarly, TM Forum research, conducted with IBM’s Institute for Business Value, finds that trust and assurance are moving to the forefront as organizations transition from early AI experimentation to deploying AI at scale.
In 5G, assurance is already fundamental, and functions such as Network Data Analytics Function (NWDAF), Data Collection Coordination Function (DCCF), and Management Data Analytics Function (MDAF) are moving networks toward a more data-driven operating model. RADCOM brings this intelligence together, giving operators real-time visibility and the ability to act on it.
In 6G, this evolution will accelerate. Assurance will move from reactive monitoring to proactive, AI-driven operations focused on customer experience and SLAs, becoming part of the network’s intelligence layer and providing the data, context, and confidence needed for autonomous decision-making.
What will 6G assurance look like?
Higher availability becomes the baseline: Assurance must monitor redundancy, detect failovers, and confirm services keep performing, turning resilience into something operators can measure and prove.
Assurance must scale with the cloud: As cloud-native network functions scale and change continuously, assurance must discover and follow them automatically.
New services require new KPIs: AI/ML traffic, massive IoT, and dynamic QoS need to be measured at the service and customer level, helping operators deliver and monetize differentiated connectivity.
SLAs need proof: Granular, network-generated QoS data gives operators evidence that they’re meeting commitments and helps them manage degradation when targets cannot be fully maintained.
Experience becomes the measure: The question shifts from “Is the network working?” to “Is the service delivering the experience the application requires?”
Better data enables autonomous operations: Richer 6G data will fuel predictive analytics and closed-loop operations, but trusted decisions depend on trusted data.
Higher stakes, harder questions
The stakes will be higher, too. With 3GPP Release 20 accepting 23 integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) use cases, from UAV tracking to smart transportation and industrial robotics, the network itself will increasingly sense its surroundings. Non-terrestrial networks and direct-to-device connectivity will extend coverage to places terrestrial networks cannot reach. These opportunities raise fundamental questions. Who can access the data? How is it transported and analyzed? What happens when connectivity is disrupted? These questions cannot be answered after the network is deployed. They must be built into how it is operated. That is where assurance comes in: verifying how sensing data flows across the network and how services behave when connectivity is degraded.
Assurance becomes the trust layer
RADCOM provides visibility across the network, enabling operators and AI systems to understand what is happening in real time, identify anomalies, support root-cause analysis, and increasingly act autonomously: collect, analyze, decide, and act. But autonomous action is only as reliable as the intelligence behind it. If the data is incomplete, delayed, or inaccurate, the decision can be wrong.
That is why assurance is becoming a foundation for trust and resilience. 6G will demand more than connectivity. It will demand confidence in the connectivity. Operators that strengthen their assurance now will build the visibility, intelligence, and resilience needed for the networks of tomorrow.
