My recent visit to Facebook for the TIP Summit and its Relevance

Early this year, during the Mobile World Conference in Barcelona, Facebook announced the creation of the Telecom Infra Project (TIP).  TIP is an engineering focused initiative led by Facebook to disrupt the telecommunications industry with open source software and hardware.  The idea is to bring together operators, manufacturers and other industry members in a joint effort to possibly standardize much of the telecom industry under the open software ideals.

Facebook has been involved in the connectivity arena for quite a while.  From Project Aquila, which pursues the idea of beaming Internet from a high flying wing drone to the more recent Terragraph Project which objective is to provide Wireless Gigabit in urban environments.  Facebook spear heading the TIP provides the needed momentum in the industry tho think outside the box and both provide connectivity to the unconnected as well as improve connectivity to the connected.

Quickly acknowledging the need for such an initiative, we decided to join the effort as a Operator Member.  Thus since March 2016 AeroNet is part of the TIP initiative.  Later during summer the first TIP Summit was announced to be held at Facebook headquarters in Silicon Valley during November.  I quickly booked my flight  and was exited about this new opportunity.

Reaching the Facebook campus, I have to say that I felt somewhat overwhelmed by what Facebook represents and the people behind the TIP project.  Being a small provider among the big players could be somewhat intimidating.  Among the presents were Deutsche Telekom's (Tmobile parent company) CTO Bruno Jacobfeuerborn, SK Telecom (Biggest South Korea Telecom Company) CTO Alex Jinsung Choi and Facebook VP of Infrastructure Jay Parikh.

Some highlights of the summit where the announcement of the Voyager platform, a 1U 100G and DWDM switch with SDN capabilities which purpose is to lower the cost of fiber deployments.

Jay Parikh presenting the Voyager 100G Switch

Another highlight of the summit was the Open Cellular, a project that is currently developing a low cost Software Defined Base Station intended for 4G, LTE, 5G deployments. 

Jay Parikh presenting Open Cellular

Although my main objective for the summit was to learn more about Project Terragraph and millimeter multipoint technologies, not much was discussed about this topic because it is still in "stealth mode" I do was able to snaps some pictures of the Terragraph equipment being tested in the Facebook campus.

TIP Lab @ Facebook

After two days at Facebook Hq I left with much more excitement as I was able to see first hand the stages of development of the projects and what the future holds for worldwide connectivity! 

View of Hacker Way @ Facebook HQ