TIP 2018 is a wakeup call for the big kit vendors

The third Telecom Infra Project (TIP) Summit marked an further attempt by operators and Facebook to accelerate the development of the telecoms industry.

In his opening keynote Axel Clauberg, TIP Chairman and VP of technology innovation at Deutsche Telekom, was careful to stress that the big kit vendors are an important part of the telecoms ecosystem. But most of the discussions that followed on the first day of the 2018 TIP Summit was focused on fixing a telecoms kit market that TIP participants clearly feel is underperforming.

Clauberg spoke about the persistent exponential growth in data traffic that is set to continue for the foreseeable future. He stressed that, while he’s not saying kit vendors don’t do enough, the industry collectively needs to do better. The clear inference is that if we leave it to the incumbent vendors things won’t move quickly enough.

A lot of what this comes down to is putting into practice all the worthy talk of agility, devops, etc that everyone agrees is a great idea in principle. Through a network of ‘community labs’ minimum viable products are built and deployed. The message is that the traditional constraints imposed by the protracted standardisation process and exhaustive testing just won’t cut it anymore and telecoms needs to get a bit more Silicon Valley in its approach,

This seems to be where Facebook comes in. One of its core strategic needs is active user growth and it it’s running out of opportunities to do that in developed markets. So its quest for ‘the next billion’ is heavily dependent on improving access to connectivity in less developed regions. This requires some new thinking on both the technological and commercial fronts.

So TIP claims to be all about novel thinking, rapid turnaround and expanding the telecoms ecosystem to a broader range of players, including startups that traditionally find it hard to engage with operators, via its TEAC programme. The general aim seems to be to open up the whole ecosystem via things like open interfaces such that it undergoes a transformation equivalent to the computer industry a generation ago. Its all about more players, more choice and more flexibility.

You can see a summary of its many working groups below, which illustrates how broad its ambitions are. Another speaker said TIP reckons it can bring about a 30% reduction in total cost of ownership of running a network. This saving will ultimately come of if the pockets of the big kit vendors. Nokia is a TIP member but there’s no sign yet of Ericsson and Huawei, for whom the very existence of TIP poses some serious existential questions.