If there’s one industry that should have been doing this years ago, it’s telecoms. You’re dealing with complex underground networks nobody can see, structures nobody can easily measure from the ground, and interdependencies between physical infrastructure and logical network topology that are genuinely difficult to communicate in a 2D diagram. Mixed reality was practically designed for this problem.
And yet adoption in telecoms has been slower than in, say, manufacturing or construction. That’s starting to change. As headset hardware matured and enterprise XR platforms built the integrations that matter — GIS data, asset management systems, 3D network models — telecoms operators found real use cases that genuinely move the needle, not just pilot projects that get demonstrated once and shelved.
Here’s where the technology is actually being used, and what’s making it stick.
Visualising Underground Networks Nobody Can See
The classic problem in any network planning or upgrade project is that the as-built records don’t match reality. Cables were rerouted. Ducts were added. The documentation was never updated. And now you’ve got an engineer on-site with a drawing that doesn’t match what they’re actually looking at.
AR overlays that pull data from GIS systems and project it onto the real world — so you can see where cables are supposed to run, what’s in each duct, and how the network connects — are the most immediately practical application. You’re not looking at a tablet. You’re looking at the ground, and the infrastructure is visualised beneath it, overlaid in context.
Several operators have trialled this for fibre rollout planning. The use case is figuring out where to route new fibre with minimal civil works — looking at what duct capacity exists, where existing fibre can be reused, and where you’d have to dig. Doing that analysis at a desk using GIS software takes hours per segment. Doing it on-site with an AR headset, where you can walk the route and see the data in context, takes significantly less time and catches errors you’d otherwise miss.
The catch is data quality. If your GIS records are inaccurate — and they usually are, at least partially — the overlay is only as good as what’s in the system. The upside is that field engineers using AR to verify records are also capturing corrections in real time, which gradually improves the underlying data.
Mast and Tower Inspection
Physical inspection of telecoms masts and towers is expensive, time-consuming, and hazardous. An experienced climber can only inspect one structure at a time. Bringing in a structural engineer for a detailed assessment adds cost. And the inspection record is usually a series of photos and handwritten notes that have to be manually interpreted back at the office.
Drone-captured imagery of towers, processed into 3D models and then viewed in VR, lets a structural engineer or experienced network planner inspect a mast in detail from the office without setting foot near it. They can measure antenna mounting positions, check clearances, identify corrosion or physical damage, and document findings — all in the virtual model. The inspection record is the model, not a set of photos.
For planning antenna upgrades or 5G equipment additions, this is particularly useful. You can test whether a new antenna fits on an existing bracket, whether there’s clearance from existing equipment, and whether the mast loading is within tolerance — all before anyone starts ordering equipment or booking a climber.
Digital Twins for Network Operations Centres
Network operations centres (NOCs) have traditionally worked with flat displays showing logical network maps — nodes, links, utilisation metrics. Some operators are experimenting with spatial displays for NOC work, where network topology is presented as a 3D structure that engineers can navigate and interact with.
The argument for this is that complex network topologies with multiple layers, redundant paths, and geographic distribution are genuinely easier to understand as 3D objects than as flat diagrams. A fault that ripples across three interconnected rings looks different — more intuitively understandable — when you can see the rings as physical structures in space and watch the fault propagation visually.
This is still relatively early. The headset form factor is a barrier for NOC work, where engineers may need to wear the headset for extended periods and need to work alongside traditional flat-screen displays. The practical deployments tend to be large-format spatial displays in a shared meeting room rather than individual headsets, used for fault analysis or capacity planning sessions rather than continuous monitoring.
Field Service with AR-Guided Repair
The field service use case is more mature. Telecoms field engineers are dealing with increasingly complex equipment — 5G radios, optical network terminals, complex data centre switching — and the expertise to diagnose and repair it is concentrated in a relatively small number of specialists.
AR-guided repair platforms (Scope AR WorkLink, TeamViewer Frontline, and similar) let a remote specialist see exactly what a field engineer is looking at, draw annotations on their view, and walk them through a repair procedure step by step. The field engineer doesn’t need to be a specialist in every piece of equipment they encounter. They’re the hands. The specialist provides the expertise remotely.
For telecoms operators with large field workforces spread across a country, this changes the economics of equipment repair significantly. Instead of flying a specialist to a remote site, you have a generalist on-site with remote expert support. First-time fix rates go up. Mean time to repair comes down.
What’s Needed to Make This Work
For any of these applications to work properly, the XR platform needs to talk to the data systems that telecoms networks run on — OSS (Operations Support Systems), BSS (Business Support Systems), GIS platforms, and asset management databases. An AR overlay showing outdated cable data is worse than no overlay, because it creates false confidence.
That integration layer is where most telecoms XR projects either succeed or fail. The technology is ready. The headsets are capable enough for these use cases. The hard work is the data pipeline — ensuring that what’s displayed in the AR view reflects the current state of the network, updates in real time when the network changes, and writes back corrections when engineers identify discrepancies.
The operators who’ve made this work have generally approached it as a data quality project that happens to involve AR headsets, not the other way around.
BT, Deutsche Telekom, and Orange have all published case studies on mixed reality for network planning and field operations in recent years. None of them claim the technology solved all their problems. All of them found use cases with genuine ROI, typically around field service efficiency and planning accuracy. That’s probably the right calibration for organisations evaluating this space in 2026.