Not your “TIP”ical Telecom Conference

The second annual TIP Summit (a few weeks ago in Santa Clara) gathered over one thousand engineers and telecom executives from all over the world with one common goal:

To create a new and better way to design, build and operate the network infrastructure that connects the world.

That is my kind of community…. The TIP community!

Founded in February 2016, the Telecom Infra Project (TIP) is an engineering-focused initiative driven by telecom engineers, software developers, integrators, and startups to disaggregate the traditional network deployment approach. The members of TIP came together in Santa Clara to collaborate on new technologies such as Machine Learning, Cloud and Edge Computing and Virtualization to examine new business approaches in the telecom space. The way TIP gets things done is by forming Project Groups that meet to collaborate on developing technology and solutions for reducing the cost and increasing the efficiencies of access, backhaul and core components of the telecom networks. This gathering was an opportunity for everyone working in these groups to come together to discuss progress and also to launch new exciting TIP Project Groups.

As part of my engagement with TIP, I had the privilege to moderate a panel of TIP Members from all over the world who have been working on the TIP Community Labs. TIP Community Labs are physical spaces hosted by network operators to collaborate and test innovative and open approaches to launching new connectivity solutions. In just over 12 months, my friend Moe Motamedi and the rest of his Facebook and TIP colleagues launched 7 of these labs in Asia, Europe, North America and Latin America. These labs are where the TIP Project Groups go to test their solutions in a real world environment ahead of commercial deployment.

TIM Brasil, one of the newest TIP operator members, was at the event to announce the launch of a new lab in Rio de Janeiro to support efforts within the Open Optical Packet Transport Project Group and begin lab trials of Voyager. Catarina Reuters who is in charge of the lab spoke of the need to share best practices within the TIP community in order to accelerate innovation. She described the 24 months it took for her company to launch a RAN sharing project as well as the complexities experienced in deploying Voice over LTE. Projects such as these can be accelerated thanks to the efforts of the TIP Community Lab. “Operators need to change their mindset on how they can share” said Catarina, “Why test something that someone has tested already in another country. If we share achievements we will innovate faster”.

Ike Elliott, CableLab’s CSO, explained how software is accelerating the launch of new services and access technologies. He gave the example of the launch of an open source LoRa server that was launched by his company in less than 8 months. CableLabs has opened a TIP Community Lab located in Louisville, Colorado that will first focus on virtualization of the RAN for non-ideal fronthaul links, supporting the vRAN Fronthaul TIP Project Group. “We’d be fools to believe that anyone has a monopoly on innovation,” said Ike. “Success lies in being able to source innovation from a community.”

Andreas Gladisch, DT’s VP Convergent Networks and co-chair of the Millimeter Wave Project Group (along with Salil Sawhney from Facebook) explained that this innovative type of connectivity solution will require a new way to deal with deployment and network planning. Instead of breaking a territory into a few large regions, networks are going to be deployed in cities and municipalities where sites will be much smaller and require line of sight. Andreas also explained how carriers need to be able to work with new, smaller players that allow for “rapid prototyping” ahead of adoption of a new technical solution by the telco community. This will also require the testing, integration and release of new services to be done in parallel as opposed to sequentially.

One of the startups selected by the TIP TEAC (TIP Ecosystem Accelerator Centers) is Athonet whose co-founder and CTO, Gianluca Verin, was also on the panel. After 12 years of effort his Evolved Packet Core can now be deployed within days. This is what happened after the earthquake in Italy when connectivity was essential for first responders to save lives and when the cell phone network had gone down. Having an environment to work in inside the carrier network will allow for new innovative players to emerge. “TIP Community Labs can take the risk instead of operators taking the risk by themselves” said Gianluca.

Reimagining telecom infrastructure cannot be only about disaggregation and virtualization and the introduction of new access technologies. It is also about making sure that the integration of these new solutions happens in a way that can adhere to existing standards. Manish Singh, VP Product at Tech Mahindra spoke of the growing challenge of interoperability as well as the need to deliver an integrated solution that can be launched at scale. The TIP Community Labs offer environment for this kind of integration testing to occur.

To finish off my panel, I asked Ike, Catarina, Andrea, Gianluca and Manish to stand united while making the universal sign of “Communicate Peace” [which I have been pictured doing for quite some time now]… after all bringing more connectivity to the world should be about making it a better place. Peace seems like a good way to start.

Can’t wait for next year’s TIP Summit to hear about the great progress made by this great community.