The TIP Millimetre Wave (mmWave) Networks Project Group aims to advance the development of innovative and cost effective solutions to address the growing demands for bandwidth.
The group is co-chaired by Facebook and Deutsche Telekom and it is supported by the second initiative, the launch of the first European TIP Community Lab in Bonn, Germany.
The third initiative is the TIP Ecosystem Acceleration Centre (TEAC), which is focused on the development of network infrastructure innovation. It will be in Berlin.
Bruno Jacobfeuerborn, CTO of Deutsche Telekom, said: “Our goal is to deliver the best network services to our customers, and at the same time deliver a superior capital efficiency. This requires more radical approaches. We value Facebook’s contributions to this space and enjoy the excellent partnership we have as part of TIP and beyond.”
The Millimetre Wave Networks Project Group will begin its work of creating innovative solutions for cost-efficient access and metro networks using the 60GHz unlicensed spectrum range. It will focus on operator use cases and the most appropriate system architectures, including fibre connectivity and mobile backhaul.
Speaking on the new group, Andreas Gladisch, Deutsche Telekom co-chair for the project group, said: “We are aiming to deliver cost-efficient solutions, truly innovating within the market. We expect our work to create a vibrant open, community-driven ecosystem that will meet the needs of telecom and city operators.”
TIP Community Labs will provide the space and equipment needed for TIP members to do their work and research. The first European Community Lab in Bonn will focus solely on mmWave technology and will be crucial to the advancement and deployment of these new technologies.
With the Ecosystem Acceleration Centres, TIP says that it is addressing the global challenge faced by many startups in order to access the market for network infrastructure. Jacobfeuerborn said: “Telecoms is generally a market with high entry barriers and is dominated by established vendors. Small startups have problems entering the telco market, even for proof of concepts. As a result, the venture capital community has been very hesitant to make infrastructure-related investments. The TEAC centre in Berlin, jointly announced by TIP, Facebook and Deutsche Telekom, will help to break this deadlock. Our work on 5G has shown DT’s leadership in driving telco innovation, and I am very confident that we will also be successful in helping push the broader telecom infrastructure ecosystem forward.”
The Telecom Infra Project was launched in 2016 as a joint project with SK Telecom, Intel, Nokia, Facebook and Deutsche Telekom. The purpose of the engineering focused initiative is to develop new telecoms hardware and systems.
