Zong has picked up an international award for the artificial intelligence system it uses to run its mobile network, in a win the company says underlines how far its home-grown engineering has come. The operator took the Operational Excellence Leader award for Innovation at The Fast Mode Awards 2026 for its Self-Intelligent RAN Optimisation Platform, a system that watches over the radio network, spots congestion on its own and fixes it without waiting for engineers to step in.
Zong described the win as its second international recognition this year for its work on artificial intelligence. The platform sits at the heart of that claim. Built entirely by Zong engineers in Pakistan, it is presented by the company as the country’s first deployment of Level 4 autonomous network operations on a live commercial network, a step that moves network management from human hands into software that can decide and act for itself.
In practice, the system works in a loop. It monitors traffic, detects where congestion is building, carries out a corrective action and then checks whether that action worked. Jobs that once took engineers several days of manual work are now handled automatically, which the company says makes the network steadier and gives customers a more reliable connection.
That matters because mobile networks in Pakistan are under constant strain. Millions of people stream video and use data-heavy apps at the same time, and demand spikes sharply in the evenings and during big events such as cricket matches, so a system that can rebalance traffic on its own, within minutes rather than days, is worth a great deal.
The recognition comes from The Fast Mode, a global telecom media brand that runs the awards each year. The 2026 programme drew nominations from more than 500 companies across over 60 countries, competing for more than 80 awards in 11 categories. Nominations opened at the start of August and closed in late October, entries were assessed by an independent expert panel, and the winners were revealed in November through a live webcast. Pakistan had another name on the winners list as well: the country’s IT minister, Shaza Fatima Khawaja, was named Industry Champion of the Year at the same awards, an honour given to only one individual worldwide each year.
The platform at the centre of Zong’s win is not new, but it has been gathering honours steadily. It was developed by Zong engineers in about six months and won a Made in Pakistan Tech Excellence Award at the Pakistan Digital Awards in June this year. A month ago, in Singapore, the same system won Pakistan Technology Innovation of the Year at the Asian Innovation Excellence Awards 2026. Zong says the platform has cut resolution times by more than 90 percent, from days to minutes, and improved peak-hour download speeds by up to 18 percent. Those figures come from the company itself and have not been independently verified, but they explain why Zong keeps putting the system forward for awards.
To understand what Level 4 means, it helps to know how the industry grades self-running networks. The telecom industry body TM Forum defines six levels, from L0, where everything is manual, up to L5, where a network runs itself entirely. Level 4, described as a highly autonomous network, is one step below the top: the system is driven by intent, predicts problems before they happen and runs closed loops of artificial intelligence that can analyse a situation, decide what to do and carry it out. People still set the goals and the boundaries, but they no longer need to approve each individual action. Such a level is assessed for a particular task, such as optimising the radio network, rather than as a single score for an operator’s entire network, and there is no public evidence that TM Forum itself has formally certified Zong at Level 4. The description remains Zong’s own.
Zong’s chief technology officer, Mao Weiliang, said the award showed that the company was taking artificial intelligence beyond simply watching the network and offering suggestions, and using it instead to make decisions and carry them out. He said the platform proved that advanced technology could be conceived, built and deployed in Pakistan.
The win fits into a wider push by Zong this year. The company, a wholly owned subsidiary of China Mobile, launched commercial 5G in March in more than 16 cities, including Islamabad, Rawalpindi, Karachi, Lahore, Peshawar and Quetta, and committed to deploying or upgrading more than 1,000 5G sites across the country during 2026. In August it announced a further programme to upgrade more than 1,000 sites to 5G, reporting trial speeds above 1.4 gigabits per second. The company has also reported a 39 percent improvement in peak-hour throughput in Islamabad after deploying AI-enabled network capabilities, though again that figure is its own.
For Zong, the award is also a branding moment. The company has built its recent campaigns around the promise of “Aisa Hai Future”, and an international award for a system built by its own engineers in Pakistan gives that slogan something concrete to stand on.
