KUALA LUMPUR, 10 JULY 2026 – Digital Nasional Berhad (DNB) has earned global recognition at the TM Forum Catalyst programme, winning the “Autonomy Accelerator” award for its role in advancing next-generation, AI-driven network operations. The award is a testament to DNB's world-class 5G network and operational excellence, adding another international accolade to a growing list of recognitions that affirm DNB's position as the operator of Malaysia's most advanced and future-ready 5G network.

The TM Forum is a global alliance of leading telecom operators, technology providers and system integrators, setting industry standards and driving innovation across the telecommunications ecosystem. The award recognises the Catalyst project that demonstrates the most significant progress towards Autonomous Networks Level 4 (ANL4) — where network operations become highly automated, self-healing, and require minimal human intervention.

This latest recognition builds on DNB’s earlier milestone, having already been acknowledged by TM Forum in 2025 for achieving Level 4 autonomous network capabilities, placing its operations among the most advanced globally.

In today’s increasingly complex 5G environment, telecom networks traditionally rely on large operations teams to monitor thousands of alerts and fix issues manually — often resulting in slower response times and higher costs.

DNB’s award-winning Catalyst project, in collaboration with leading international operators including T-Mobile, Telefonica, Turknet and AXIAN Group, together with elite technology partners Sutherland, Snowflake, Nagarro, DigitalRoute and Enfec, introduces an AI-powered “Agentic Network Operations Centre (NOC)”, where intelligent software agents can detect and predict network issues before they happen, as well as automatically fix faults across the network. This “self-healing” capability enables networks to run faster, smoother, and more efficiently — with significantly less manual intervention.

The importance of autonomous network operations becomes even greater as DNB scales its expanded 200MHz of spectrum — the largest contiguous spectrum holding in Malaysia. Managing significantly increased network capacity requires intelligent, AI-driven automation that can optimise spectrum utilisation in real time, predict traffic demands, and rapidly resolve issues before they impact users.

For DNB's telco Access Seekers, this translates into more stable and reliable 5G performance, faster fault resolution, improved network availability, and more efficient use of network resources. AI-powered operations enable DNB to maximise the full value of its expanded 200MHz spectrum assets, ensuring greater capacity, better service consistency and enhanced customer experience as demand for 5G services continues to grow.

Reinforcing DNB’s Next Phase

This achievement builds on DNB’s recently announced next phase of 5G growth, which focuses on enhancing network capacity, performance, and future readiness. DNB is expanding spectrum capacity, upgrading sites, and investing in advanced capabilities to support the next wave of digital innovation in Malaysia.

"The award reflects the robustness of our network architecture, our commitment to delivering a high-quality customer experience, and our ability to manage and optimise a nationwide 5G platform at scale,” said Ken Tan, DNB’s Chief Technology Officer. “Most importantly, it reinforces DNB’s role as Malaysia’s leading 5G platform, enabling consumers, enterprises and public sector organisations to harness the full potential of digital innovation and drive the nation’s digital transformation ambitions.”