Getting Real in Madrid: TIP says open tech ‘ready to scale’

The pandemic-enforced three-year hiatus since the Telecom Infra Project’s (TIP) last Summit, in Amsterdam in 2019, created something of a communication and interaction void for what is essentially a nascent community movement promoting and supporting the advancement of open and disaggregated network technology.

To fill this void, and counter naysayers, Executive Director Kristian Toivo is now on a mission for TIP to double up on outreach, with Chair and Vodafone Director of Network Architecture Santiago (Yago) Tenorio leading a drive to ensure that Fÿuz and its TIP Summit component are deemed by attendees to be the industry’s undisputed leading event.

With the TIP community again meeting to share progress, key projects like OpenRAN and transport are gearing up to address the opportunities and challenges of scale that they face, as they advance through operationalisation and deployment phases.

Bettering Barça

While Tenorio has been TIP’s Chair for over two years, this will be the first TIP Summit under his lead. He remembers well the surprising feedback from the 2018 and 2019 attendees (in London and Amsterdam, respectively) that “this is a much better event than Mobile World Congress”, thanks to being “more to the point (only one topic)”, with “much less noise”.

“ You have everybody here that you want to make business with: it’s much easier to engage in conversations. Everyone here is interested in the same thing, which is disaggregation — supporters and detractors, it doesn’t matter, you can find them all in here and engage with them. ”

Tenorio, paraphrasing the feedback from past TIP Summits.

Tenorio does not want to just match this standard for the anticipated 1,500 attendees in Madrid; he is now aiming to deliver the “best event of the year”, and with an added ingredient that actually is “food, good food, which is going to be dramatically, remarkably different to the Mobile World Congress experience — because every time I go there, I lose like 4kg”. Perhaps no surprise that Madrid is also Tenorio’s birthplace…

Recalling his tenure as TIP Chair to date, Tenorio summarised the globally tempestuous period as one when the organisation took open RAN “from being a nice experiment, a lab experiment, to something that is being rolled out in the field”. He also sees it as a time when TIP itself “challenged ourselves to be adding more value, and to be more specific as to what it is that we do for the industry, what is our role, and how we help operators and suppliers as a whole”. “I think we made a lot of progress on that as well”, he adds.

A particular highlight for Tenorio will be the opening Fÿuz keynote he will share with Dr. Alex Jinsung Choi, who is the O-RAN Alliance’s COO as well as being SVP, Group Technology and Head of T-Labs at Deutsche Telekom. He considers this a personification of all that is good and has been achieved by TIP, in terms of the industry being able to work together for mutual benefit. It also harks back to the 2018 Summit when he shared the stage with Telefónica I+D Chief Executive David Del Val to advance an early OpenRANRequest for Information.

TIP: getting hands-on

This ties into a refresh of the TIP team, now led by Ericsson alumnus Toivo. Only around five months in, he is working to drive this recalibration, including efforts to improve outreach and expand in North America (the one region that can feel underweight on the operator front), as well as better serve the roughly 700 member organisations that encompass many InfraCos (including all major TowerCos) and other service providers, as well as operators, vendors and system integrators.

“ For me, open and disaggregated [systems], as well as particularly open RAN, are really moving into becoming a commercial reality, meaning something we need to start deploying at scale. This is very much where I’m working with my team and the board of TIP to position us to be even more relevant in enabling commercial-grade deployment at scale. ”

That’s where we see our future ambition. It’s not a radical change, but it’s much more concrete, hands-on, [and about] ‘how can we enable this diverse industry’… where some operators want to do it all (everything themselves), others are buying it as a turnkey, and a third group (probably most of them) may be doing something in between. How can we foster and enable that as TIP with the membership that we have? ”

Toivo.

Whilst easy to treat open RAN (which now lays claim to about 150 trials and deployments worldwide) as a catchall for everything TIP encompasses, both Toivo and Tenorio make clear that the group is also busy and thriving elsewhere. Although a specific figure is not yet available, Toivo highlights disaggregated transport solutions with a TIP heritage to be now laying claim to double-digit market share. The Open Optical, Fixed Broadband, and Open Wi-Fi groups will also be notable at Fÿuz, which will additionally be hosting significant activity around metaverse connectivity and what this will demand from, and offer to, service providers.