An Update from the TIP Summit
This week, the TIP community gathered for our first ever Summit to discuss the progress we’ve made, share ideas, and launch new initiatives.
We’re excited to welcome a number of new members to TIP, including Bell Canada, du (EITC), NBN, Orange, Telia, Telstra, Accenture, Amdocs, Canonical, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and Toyota InfoTechnology Center. They join an existing strong community of more than 300 members who’ve been with us or signed on since we launched.
In addition to these new members, we’d like to share progress on several new technical and non-technical initiatives that we believe will transform the state of the industry. These include the following:
TIP Ecosystem Acceleration Centers
With the growth of the internet and the rise of data-intensive services, we believe that innovation can and should come from everywhere, beyond the current sources. We need to find ways to attract the brightest entrepreneurial minds and innovative investors to work together as part of the wider TIP community to produce breakthrough technologies and products in telecom infrastructure space.
Today, we announced the first location for the upcoming TIP Ecosystem Acceleration Centers. These centers will incubate local talent around the world and accelerate product development through support from leading global and local investors. We will be establishing an Acceleration Center in Seoul in early Q1 2017 and we expect to expand to other parts of the world soon after. The first TIP Ecosystem Acceleration Center is sponsored by SK Telecom and Facebook.
The TIP Ecosystem Acceleration Center will provide access to mentorship, hands-on sessions with industry experts, and a great office space where founders can work with other smart, talented founders who are passionate about solving complex infrastructure problems. Our goal is to create and foster a self-sustaining ecosystem that delivers new, innovative, agile and deployable infrastructure solutions to operators quickly and seamlessly.
People and Process Project Group
We’re launching the People and Process project group within TIP in order to develop and share cultural and process transformation best practices that can improve operators’ key metrics. The group will be co-chaired by Bell Canada and Facebook. Members of this new group include: Accenture, Agilitrix, Bell Canada, Deloitte, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, NBN, SK Telecom, Tata Communications, Telefonica, and Telstra.
Voyager
Facebook contributed Voyager, the industry’s first white-box transponder and IP/MPLS routing solution. Voyager’s design will be available to the TIP community to fulfill our goal of disaggregating hardware and software components of the network stack. Voyager has already being successfully tested with our TIP members Equinix and MTN.
OpenCellular
Facebook’s OpenCellular designs and schematics are now fully open source within TIP to accelerate the industry’s ability to provide wireless access in remote areas of the world. We’re excited to see how this knowledge transfer will empower our partners to develop solutions that meet the unique needs of remote communities.
Thank you to everyone who attended our first Summit and all of the TIP community across the world for making this first gathering a success. I’m thrilled with the progress we’ve made and cannot wait to see how this community works together to transform telecom infrastructure. If you’re interested in joining the TIP community, you can sign up here: contact