Telenor and BubbleRAN Run Agentic AI Optimization of Private 5G on a Color Line Ship

Telenor and French network-software company BubbleRAN have put an agentic AI system into daily operation on the private 5G network of one of Color Line's passenger and cargo vessels, which sails between Norway and international destinations, BubbleRAN announced in February 2026. The system, Opti-Sphere, optimizes Telenor Maritime's network on top of an Ericsson private 5G deployment, and the partners report significant gains in performance and reliability and better onboard connectivity for passengers and crew, without publishing figures. "Opti-Sphere shows what happens when AI becomes truly operational: it doesn't just observe the network, it reasons, validates, and improves it," said Navid Nikaein, CEO of BubbleRAN. Running a mobile network at sea is hard to tune by hand: the ship's metal structure, interference from other networks and changing weather constantly affect the access and backhaul radio links. Opti-Sphere combines AI agents with conventional algorithms to control access and backhaul radio parameters in real time and optimize uplink and downlink performance. It turns live network data into recommendations and, when approved, applies configuration changes that have first been checked in a real-time digital twin. The model was trained and validated on data from 33 ships worldwide; on the Color Line vessel it currently applies adaptive power control across two shipboard cells, continuously adjusting user-equipment uplink power within operator-defined constraints and safety policies by learning from historical data and testing a small set of candidate settings in the twin. The stack is multi-vendor: BubbleRAN's SMO-Sphere platform and Agentic Toolkit provide automation and orchestration, the NVIDIA NeMo Agent Toolkit and an NVIDIA/BubbleRAN telco configuration blueprint built on MX-AI run the agentic workflows, and LITEON 5G small cells and Amarisoft software 5G supply the network, terminals and digital-twin environment. Telenor Research & Innovation and Telenor Maritime co-developed and validated the system. The partners demonstrated Opti-Sphere at MWC Barcelona in March 2026, including a small replica of a private maritime 5G network, and see coordinated optimization with neighboring public and private networks as the next step.