Last week, the JOINER (Joint Open Infrastructure for Networks Research) Platform, a project we’re proud to contribute to, won the National AI Award 2025 in the High Tech & Telecom category.
For us at Weaver Labs, this recognition means more than a trophy on a shelf. It’s proof that the future we’ve been building toward is already taking shape — one where telecom networks are open, automated, and built for collaboration.
Telecom is changing fast. Networks aren’t just getting faster; they’re getting smarter. Artificial intelligence is no longer something that sits on top of the network; it’s becoming part of the network itself.
That shift is why AI matters. For decades, telecom innovation has been limited by rigid infrastructure, siloed systems, and centralised cloud dependencies that made experimentation slow and expensive. AI has the power to change that — but only if the infrastructure beneath it is flexible, distributed, and programmable.
That’s where JOINER comes in.
Led by the University of Bristol’s Smart Internet Lab, JOINER brings together universities, industry, and government in a large national consortium. Together, we are building the UK’s first open platform for next-generation network research — a living testbed that allows new ideas to be tested, shared, and scaled across 11 interconnected sites nationwide.
And inside that platform, our technology — Cell-Stack — plays a vital role.
Within JOINER, Weaver Labs provides the automation and orchestration layer that keeps everything running smoothly. Through our Cell-Stack software, we deliver Hypervisor as a Service (HaaS) — an automation capability that simplifies how researchers deploy and manage the complex cloud environments needed for telecom experimentation.
HaaS is what makes AI truly deployable in telecom environments. It abstracts and orchestrates diverse compute resources — from GPUs and CPUs to containers and bare metal — into one seamless, scalable pool. This allows AI workloads to run right alongside traditional network functions, not in separate silos or faraway clouds.
In simple terms, that means AI can run where it’s needed most — whether at dense urban edge sites or in rural networks — responding to real-time conditions and scaling dynamically with demand.
Instead of spending hours configuring infrastructure, users can spin up their environments in minutes and focus on what really matters: testing, learning, and innovating.
AI is evolving from something that runs on networks to something that makes networks run.
Through JOINER, we’re showing what that looks like in practice:
These aren’t future aspirations; they’re capabilities that JOINER’s infrastructure already supports. By embedding AI into the network fabric, we’re creating systems that can learn, adapt, and optimise themselves.
That’s the “why” behind our work: AI makes networks more human-like — aware, responsive, and capable of improving themselves.
JOINER works because it’s built on collaboration.
The University of Bristol provides leadership and vision, coordinating a national ecosystem of partners. Each organisation brings its expertise — from advanced AI research to network infrastructure and software automation.
Madevo contributes cutting-edge work on agentic AI, showing how intelligence can be embedded into the very fabric of networks.
At Weaver Labs, our contribution lies in making this ecosystem operable: enabling every partner to deploy, manage, and scale their AI and telecom workloads seamlessly through Cell-Stack.
It’s this collaboration — between academia, industry, and government — that’s redefining how innovation happens in telecom. Instead of isolated testbeds, the UK now has a connected national environment for network experimentation.
Winning the National AI Award isn’t just about what JOINER has achieved so far. It’s about what it represents.
It shows that AI-native telecom infrastructure is not a future concept; it’s here.
It shows that when we make networks programmable and open, innovation accelerates.
And it shows that automation, openness, and collaboration are the foundations of the next generation of connectivity.
For us, this award is a reminder of why we do what we do: to remove the barriers that slow innovation down, to simplify the complex, and to turn bold ideas into real-world solutions.
The work doesn’t stop here. JOINER will continue to grow, connecting more sites, more researchers, and more industries across the UK.
At Weaver Labs, we’ll keep evolving Cell-Stack, adding greater flexibility, interoperability, and intelligence to ensure the UK remains at the forefront of AI-driven telecom innovation.
The next generation of networks will not be owned.
They will be shared, intelligent, and open.
And we’re proud to be part of the consortium making that future a reality.
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