by TIP News
The festive season is often a great time for reflection, looking back on the year that has been and the changes we have experienced, as well as being a great time to look ahead to the challenges and adventures of the year to come.
2022 was certainly a year of growth and change for the Telecom Infra Project. With a growing board, new executives, successful deployments, the launch of TIP Academy, and our new, industry-defining event, Fyuz!
We’ve packed a lot into the last 12 months, but here are just a few of our highlights.
The Growing TIP Community
What better way to begin than by looking back at how our community has grown in 2022? TIP is all about community, and this year we welcomed some fantastic new additions.
Laurent Leboucher from Orange, Amith Maharj from MTN and Kaniz Mahdi from DT all joined TIP’s board. We also welcomed Kristian Toivo as Executive Director, Eugina Jordan as Chief Marketing Officer and Shannon Acton as Head of Operations.
The TIP ecosystem now consists of over 650 participants, including over 100 service providers, 90 vendors and OEMs and over 120 integrators, infrastructure providers and system aggregators.
This community has helped deliver over 150 trials and deployments across nearly 50 countries.
We’re so excited about the team we have in place and the community driving innovation within TIP. We hope you all raise a glass over the holidays!
Our shiny new badges!
With operators looking to ‘open up’ networks from the RAN to the core, and even the WLAN, they are urgently looking for more efficient ways to test and validate new technologies to accelerate deployments and return on investment.
In response, TIP launched the TIP Testing and Validation (T&V) Framework in 2022. This allows operators and vendors to test and validate the growing range of open and disaggregated products and solutions, either independently or as part of a broader network infrastructure.This has led to the launch of TIP’s new badging program, which assures operators that particular products, combinations, or solutions, whether from a single or multiple vendors, are ready for deployment.
As for our project groups, what a year it has been!
Here is a snapshot of some of the main news from TIP this year.
Open RAN
The Open RAN project group focuses on scaling up the productization of Open RAN technology. This year, it published the Open RAN Release 2 Roadmap, continuing to accelerate Open RAN towards commercialization.
This roadmap harmonizes the prioritized operator requirements, including the 5 European Open RAN MoU signatories, with vendor’s product readiness, categorized in key features and functions, mapping them into a series of minor releases over time.
Other highlights have included:
- Middle East operators establish region’s first Open RAN centralized test lab in collaboration with TIP and Intel
- The Telecom Infra Project launches testing environment for OpenRAN orchestration and automation ecosystem
- GCC7 operators collaborate with TIP on a whitepaper that explores opportunities for Open RAN across the Middle East
- TIP OpenRAN PG accelerates Open RAN Commercialization
5G
5G is still the talk of the town in Telco-land. In order to make the most of their 5G investments, mobile operators must densify their urban networks. This takes a new way of thinking about the use of shared street assets for small cells and a new way of working with city governments.
The TIP Connected City Infrastructure Solution Group, chaired by Dublin City Council, published a Playbook containing learnings and recommendations for best practices. The playbook is complemented by several templates and reference documents to ease urban 5G network deployment through collaboration between cities and operators.
Meanwhile, the TIP 5G Private Networks solution group, chaired by Telefonica, paved the way to transform private network economics and introduced a blueprint for a more cost-effective and scalable private 5G solution.
Open Optical & Packet Transport
The OOPT project group announced its first Distributed Disaggregated Backbone Router (DDBR) requirement compliant solutions, and later this year, Turkcell became the first to deploy TIP’s DDBR Internet Gateway solution in its production network.
DDBR is an operator-driven initiative led by KDDI, MTN, Telefónica, and Vodafone that defines the operator requirements of an open and disaggregated solution for core applications including P and Peering Routers. The successful products have been listed in the TIP Exchange and will continue to pass through the TIP end-to-end process of testing and validation.
The OOPT group also returned to OFC after two years of Covid-19 restrictions this year, continuing to drive and advocate sustainable innovation. TIP will be in San Diego for OFC 2023 – see you there!
OpenWiFi
TIP reached an exciting new milestone for its OpenWiFi products in 2022, when Boingo Wireless became the first TIP member to adopt its disaggregated OpenWi-Fi software system to enhance its Wi-Fi 6E network builds for commercial deployments.
TIP OpenWiFi, launched in 2021, is an open-source-based Wi-Fi architecture that enables multi-vendor, interoperable Wi-Fi networks.
Other highlights from the OpenWiFi group include:
- Spectra in India deploys managed OpenWiFi in multi-dwelling units
- Liberty Global / Virgin Media in Ireland deploy public outdoor Open Wi-Fi access points as a part of Ireland’s Wi-Fi4U initiative in Dublin City Centre
- Edgecore showcase Open Wi-Fi compliant SKUs for Wi-Fi 6 and 7 at Fyuz
- TIP Open Wi-Fi and WBA set up an agreement to drive forward Open Roaming
Metaverse-Ready Project Group
One of the newest project groups launched by TIP is the Metaverse-Ready Networks Project Group, alongside Meta, Microsoft, T-Mobile, Telefonica and Sparkle. It has already hit the ground running, collaborating with Intel on mMIMO for the Metaverse.
Open Fixed Access Networks
Another new project group at TIP is the Open Fixed Access Networks subgroup. Working together, this sub-group is looking to address the specific challenges that are most meaningful when building and scaling their access networks to meet consumer demands. Their work will focus on improving interoperability and diversity in the access network, accelerating innovation through modernisation of operations and deployment architectures, and boosting capacity in the last mile through transition from GPON to XGS-PON.
Expect more from this new group in 2023!
TIP Academy
Outside of the innovation stemming from TIP’s project groups, the other main motivator for TIP is upskilling the telecoms industry. TIP participants have expressed the need for an industry-led, operator and vendor-neutral training service, designed to address a global skills and resource shortage.
This year, they got it, when TIP launched a new platform – ‘TIP Academy’ – in collaboration with Accenture. TIP Academy will offer courses that center on the wide range of open disaggregated solutions that are currently in development. The courses will be enriched with case studies and online events that allow the members of the TIP Academy community to learn from real-world experiences, such as insights from tests in TIP Community Labs and pilot trials, which can then be utilized within their respective organizations.
Since its launch in May, the TIP Academy has been growing from strength to strength. TIP Academy Open RAN programme has now commercially launched eight learning programmes that contain 45 courses (almost 35 hours of learning). The first set of charter clients — Vodafone, Meta, Accenture, Orange and Deutsche Telekom — have now purchased courses and signed up their first wave of learners. New organisations are onboarding with TIP Academy as well, including a collaboration with USAID for Southeast Asia, universities in Europe, and professional consumers (“prosumers”). Students, professionals and job seekers now have access to enhance their knowledge and skills in this new wave of telecom innovation and receive TIP Academy certificates to add to their credentials.
Fyuz – Tasting the Future of Telecom!
Last but not least, Fyuz, our industry-leading event, came to Madrid in October.
The combination of three summits – TIP Summit, the Open RAN Summit and Metaverse Connectivity Summit – Fyuz saw 223 speakers in 50 sessions sharing insights, innovation and ideas to more than 1300 attendees.
The atmosphere and sense of community at Fyuz was fantastic, perhaps helped by three celebrity chefs whipping up fab food fusions!
Fyuz will be returning to Madrid next year from the 9th to 11th October.
Thanks for your support – see you all in 2023!