Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg at the on-going MWC unveiled that the company is teaming up with leading operators such as Deutsche Telekom, SK Telecom and EE and leading vendors such as Nokia and Intel to form Telecom Infra Project (TIP) to drive better connectivity and delivery of richer services leveraging Facebook's Open Compute Project.
Facebook in a blog post wrote that "TIP members will work together to contribute designs in three areas — access, backhaul, and core and management - applying the Open Compute Project models of openness and disaggregation as methods of spurring innovation."
TIP will also collaborate on the acceleration of technologies such as 5G and the development of new technologies.
SK Telecom, one of the operators Facebook will be working with, said in a statement that it will be contributing to TIP by sharing its industry-leading 5G enabling technologies/services as well as its outstanding network solutions based on virtualization technologies such as Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV).
Jason Taylor, Vice President of Infrastructure, Facebook
Facebook is excited to work through TIP with some of the industry's best engineering and operational talent to improve connectivity worldwide. The challenge of meeting exponentially growing network demand while increasing access and lowering costs has never been greater.
Park Jin-hyo, SVP and Head of Network Technology R&D Center at SK Telecom
To meet constantly changing customer demands in the upcoming 5G era and pursue the software-centric open architecture, we need a new way to revolutionize how the networks are built.
