Three and a half years after its birth, the Telecom Infra Project is trying to be more collaborative than confrontational.

Iain Morris, International Editor

October 3, 2019

7 Min Read
Facebook's TIP Is Desperate to Add Friends

Attilio Zani doesn't look especially nautical when he meets Light Reading in central London, several weeks before the Telecom Infra Project (TIP) -- the Facebook-led group he directs -- heads to Amsterdam for its latest annual summit. But it's to a seafaring metaphor he turns when asked if TIP is really making an impact.

"The telecom industry is a bit like a supertanker, but we have a coalition of willing parties from telcos jumping into speedboats and trying to go faster," he says. "Getting the supertanker to join with us will be a challenge."

Three and a half years since it sailed into the market, TIP looks a bit like a supertanker itself. Its list of members is now so long that it's broken alphabetically into neat chunks on the organization's website. The mission statement is as big and bold as ever: To lead a revolution in what is often seen as a moribund market for telecom network equipment, driving down costs and spurring innovation.

Figure 1: Finding Friends TIP's Attilio Zani (left) speaks at this year's Mobile World Congress alongside TIP chairman and Deutsche Telekom executive Axel Clauberg, TIP's Attilio Zani (left) speaks at this year's Mobile World Congress alongside TIP chairman and Deutsche Telekom executive Axel Clauberg,

Zani calls it "democratizing telecom," and he admits there is still "a long way to go." Skeptics question TIP's significance when operators are choosing traditional suppliers and technologies developed in the old-fashioned way for their new 5G networks. That generational shift would seem the perfect opportunity for disruption. To stick with the ocean-going analogies, has TIP missed the boat?

Far from it, according to Zani. Despite the lack of any "big bang" moment, there is no shortage of activity behind the scenes. Service providers are stepping up and pooling their expertise, he says. Radio access networks (RANs) supporting commercial services already include TIP-generated components. Trials have been rolled over into production networks. If there seems to have been little recent publicity, one or two important announcements are imminent, Zani promises.

It all points to a less flashy role for TIP than some envisaged in early 2016, when Facebook launched the initiative at that year's Mobile World Congress (MWC) event in Barcelona. The "open source" group threatened to upend the equipment industry, just as Facebook's Open Compute Project had already done in data centers, said parts of the media. Yet most of TIP's activities today are not based on open source technology. The clash between the old and the new has also been overstated. "Throwing away relationships with successful and capable organizations that have provided solutions so far would probably be unwise," says Zani.

If there has been any change in approach, TIP's executive director has not been around long enough to know. Joining in September last year, he previously worked at the GSM Association (GSMA), a telecom trade group that runs MWC and forms part of the traditional set-up. But he is adamant that TIP is not trying to replace or become an alternative to groups like the GSMA or standards bodies such as ETSI and the 3GPP. It will never be a developer of specifications, he says.

For all the latest news from the wireless networking and services sector, check out our dedicated Mobile content channel here on Light Reading.

What it can do is "drawdown" on the specifications that others develop and turn them into something practical through its various working groups. The goal remains ambitious. Noting the rampant vendor consolidation of recent years, Zani says he wants to "reinstall economies and breadth of choice for operators." This would set the industry up for what he calls its "next season," in which he reckons there will be an unprecedented need for collaboration. But reaching that point will be difficult when there are so many different associations and standards groups. TIP can be the industry's guide to solid ground.

"The symbiosis comes when we have an output from our project groups that has tested, checked and perhaps hardened the solution. That information needs to go back to the community where it can be considered by the specification," says Zani. "In that respect we are looking for TIP to have relations with a number of different organizations across the industry." TIP is already in discussions with the O-RAN Alliance, a relatively new telco-led group developing new RAN specifications, and the Open Networking Forum (ONF), another group with an open source focus. It has also made approaches to ETSI and the GSMA.

Next page: Suspicious minds

Suspicious minds
Big chunks of the industry remain deeply suspicious of TIP, though. In the RAN equipment sector, years of consolidation mean three giant vendors -- Ericsson, Huawei and Nokia -- today control most of the market. And while Nokia is a long-standing member of TIP, there are glaring gaps in the E and H sections of the membership page. Those look even more conspicuous given both vendors' participation in ONF and Ericsson's decision to join the O-RAN Alliance earlier this year. Has the initial publicity about the TIP threat scared them off?

"It could be down to misconception or sensitivity to building in the open," says Zani, speculating on why they remain strangers. "They have a long history of having very capable engineers building in private and in R&D centers, and what we are doing is very different. I can say that Nokia's involvement has been very welcome, and their board membership has been very beneficial."

Even so, TIP's relationships with these giants pose a quandary. Without them on board, its ability to influence groups such as ETSI and the GSMA remains in doubt. Win them over, and it starts to look more like one of those organizations itself. Smaller companies and innovators may be understandably worried that giant vendors seize control of the vessel and steer it somewhere else.

At least one prominent startup has previously voiced concern about working with associations like TIP. "Generally speaking, and without naming any project, small companies cannot really participate in those programs," said Franck Spinelli, the CEO of a networking startup called Amarisoft, previously championed by French telco Orange, during a conversation with Light Reading in March last year. "You are too small to spend time on those things."

To prove the naysayers wrong, TIP must first persuade the investor community that its network startups hold promise. And there are some encouraging signs, according to Zani. A couple of startups participating in TIP's accelerator program have already managed to secure funding, he says. While their identities have not been confirmed to Light Reading (yet), Altiostar, a TIP member developing virtualized RAN technology, landed $114 million in a funding round earlier this year. That included support from ecommerce giant Rakuten, which is building a new mobile network in Japan on TIP principles. "Rakuten's success is important," says Zani. "The proof they will bring is really evidence of what we know is logically sound."

Want to know more about 5G? Check out our dedicated 5G content channel here on
Light Reading.

Making telecom sexy to venture capitalists (VCs) will not be easy. Hardware has in recent years become unfashionable, says James Crawshaw, a senior analyst with Heavy Reading. "VCs chased unicorns that promised more scalability based on SaaS [software-as-a-service] or two-sided platforms like Airbnb," he says. Nevertheless, there have been some acquisitions in the market for software-defined networks. And recent developments may hint at a change in the investment climate, including the withdrawal of an initial public offering by WeWork, a company providing shared workspace. "It perhaps indicates a shift in sentiment away from fluff to real engineering and scientific companies," says Crawshaw.

The big challenge for TIP will be getting that telecom super-tanker to budge. It must prove it is not just a community of businesses and organizations experimenting with new technologies and talking about change. Its working groups need to show products that can be deployed at scale by a broad set of players. If it can do that, says Zani, "the investor community will get excited again about telecom."

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— Iain Morris, International Editor, Light Reading

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About the Author(s)

Iain Morris

International Editor, Light Reading

Iain Morris joined Light Reading as News Editor at the start of 2015 -- and we mean, right at the start. His friends and family were still singing Auld Lang Syne as Iain started sourcing New Year's Eve UK mobile network congestion statistics. Prior to boosting Light Reading's UK-based editorial team numbers (he is based in London, south of the river), Iain was a successful freelance writer and editor who had been covering the telecoms sector for the past 15 years. His work has appeared in publications including The Economist (classy!) and The Observer, besides a variety of trade and business journals. He was previously the lead telecoms analyst for the Economist Intelligence Unit, and before that worked as a features editor at Telecommunications magazine. Iain started out in telecoms as an editor at consulting and market-research company Analysys (now Analysys Mason).

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