How we work

We seek to expand the supply chain and drive innovation across the entire telecom landscape. That means collectively designing, building, and testing technologies that are more efficient and interoperable across the whole product lifecycle. TIP aligns a diversity of skills and creates economies of scale to accelerate commercial solutions.

TIP's CORE ACTIVITIES

IDEATE
DEFINE
BUILD
TEST
RELEASE
DEPLOY
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Ideate & Define

Identify the best market opportunities for connectivity from operators and other connectivity stakeholders. Prioritize business-driven use cases and align on high-level technical requirements to address these use cases.

Activities

Project Groups
Project groups are the initial starting place for the TIP process, where we design and build TIP technologies. TIP currently has 3 categories of project groups: Product project groups, Solution project groups, and Software project groups. Project groups have a Charter that identifies the objective, scope, deliverables, and leadership.

Project groups meet on a specific cadence and the output is focused on defining deliverables that are focused on deploying open, interoperable, disaggregated, standards-based solutions and defining the roadmap for test and validation. In most project groups, the focus is not on the development of interface standards but more on referencing those standards to define requirements and use cases that will support disaggregated solutions. Solution groups focus on defining the deployment guidelines, test outcomes, and “how to” deploy a specific solution within a specific Segment. Software project groups will focus entirely on the development of source code for disaggregated technology in an environment that supports transparency and agility.

We know good ideas can come from anywhere. That’s why we also work with our partners to build TIP Ecosystem Acceleration Centers (TEACs) around the world to help promising telecom startups bring their idea to market through the TIP Community.

Community Deliverables Include:

  • Use case documents, published by project groups, providing inputs to product roadmaps
  • Product requirements documents (“Minimum Viable Products”) published by project groups, describing:
    • Individual network elements
    • End-to-end network configurations
  • Test Scripts or Test materials to identify initial testing and validation criteria
  • Feedback from Test & Validation
    • Exit Reports containing feedback from lab and field trials
    • Deployment Guidelines after feedback from Lab results
    • Playbooks
  • Source code for software contribution

 

Build & Test

Our Test & Validation framework measures and tests network elements, network products, or end-to-end configurations against project group requirements. Through TIP Community Labs, participants collaborate to produce and validate project group solutions, lab test plans, exit reports, and specifications.

At TIP’s core, we are about taking early POC’s, products, and solutions into the TIP Lab and testing environments to drive the validation and eventual deployment of open and disaggregated solutions. TIP’s Lab and testing environment results in badges highlighting conformance and maturity and are detailed on TIP’s Exchange.

Activities

Community Labs
TIP Community Labs enable collaboration between participant companies by providing a space for TIP project groups to come together to collaborate and innovate. While the labs are dedicated to TIP projects and host TIP project teams, the space and basic equipment are sponsored by individual TIP participant companies hosting the space.

Test & Integration
Test & Integration validates end-to-end network configurations with products from different partners in common environments or use cases. This brings partners and operators together to agree on common test plans that facilitate future integration into networks.

TIP Badges
TIP Badges are applied to Qualified Offerings of TIP participant companies, identifying which TIP program or programs the Qualified Offerings participated in. Any company that is a TIP member may list their Qualified Offerings on TIP Exchange.

Field Testing
Testing TIP technology in real environments to collect feedback to refine products and solutions before deployment.

Community Deliverables Include:

  • Test Plan documents published by project groups describing test cases to be used to validate the products and technical solutions built by the technical suppliers vs. the PG requirements
  • Software Development
  • Lab Test Plans, Test Scripts, Test Materials, and Lab Exit Reports
  • Field Trial Test Scripts and Exit Reports (lab & field testing)
  • Validated Blueprints including use cases and technical requirements, product architectures, reference designs and test materials

Output:

  • Publication at TIP Exchange: with products showing TIP Badges according to the results of previous testing activities

 

Release & Deploy

Final validation and best practice sharing of commercial deployments of open disaggregated network components, configurations, or end-to-end solutions.

Activities

TIP Exchange
TIP Exchange brings together the ecosystem to drive new connectivity solutions to market. TIP Exchange continues to grow with new TIP-qualified offerings allowing TIP members to showcase their products and solutions so that service providers can easily evaluate technology and technology partnerships for flexible and innovative connectivity solutions. Final validation and best practice sharing of commercial deployments of open disaggregated network components, configurations, or end-to-end solutions. Learn more and browse the marketplace.

Output:

  • Publication at TIP Exchange: with products showing TIP Badges according to the results of previous testing activities
  • Publication of Whitepapers and Playbooks illustrating learnings and deployment successes. Examples