Expanding TIP Community Labs to Accelerate Collaborative Innovation Globally

TIP’s mission of creating a new approach to building and deploying telecom network infrastructure encourages the industry to adopt open and collaborative practices for developing new technologies. As a community, we can accelerate innovative telecom solutions from testing to deployment by utilizing an open, collaborative approach. TIP Community Labs help fuel this progress by providing a space for innovation. We are encouraged by the rapid growth of the program over the past year, and we’re excited to announce the addition of four new TIP Community labs.

TIP Community Labs are physical spaces that enable in-person collaboration among members of TIP project groups. While the labs are dedicated to TIP projects and host TIP project teams, the spaces and basic equipment are sponsored by individual TIP member companies. With the labs, we aim to provide a welcoming environment for project groups to develop tech solutions tailored to address use cases defined by operators. TIP Community Labs enable rapid real-world pilots that we hope lead to the adoption of new solutions at scale.

We established the first TIP Community Lab at Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park last year. This fall, SK Telecom and Deutsche Telekom opened new labs in in Seoul and Berlin respectively. SK Telecom’s Seoul lab is focused on testing technologies from the Solutions Integration project group, while Deutsche Telekom’s Berlin lab focuses on ideas incubated within the mmWave Networks project group.

Today, we’re excited that the Community Labs program is expanding to a total of 7 labs, with several new labs sponsored by TIP members around the world:

• TIM Brasil has opened a new lab in Rio de Janeiro to support efforts within the Open Optical Packet Transport project group and begin lab trials of Voyager
• Bharti Airtel will launch a Community Lab in Guragon, India to focus on projects related to the vRAN Fronthaul project group
• CableLabs has opened a TIP Community Lab located in Louisville, Colorado that will first focus on virtualization of the radio access network (RAN) for non-ideal fronthaul links, supporting the vRAN Fronthaul project group
• Facebook will expand its TIP Community Lab footprint, opening a development space in London supporting the European region, creating a global counterpart to the original TIP Community Lab in Menlo Park, California

TIP Community Labs are a powerful resource for TIP project groups, accelerating the progress of building and deploying disaggregated solutions at scale. We know that no single company or product can singularly transform the industry, and that’s why we continue to focus on bringing the community together to drive forward new ideas.

If you’re interested in learning more about the framework and philosophy underpinning the Community Lab program, including specifics about the design of the labs and the tools used, please visit this document on the TIP website.