Emphasis on openness, collaboration to help telcos achieve massive scale
BARCELONA, Spain – As Facebook has grown to support a staggering 1.58 billion users, the company has devised purpose-built network infrastructure designed to allow global access to a massive data repository. Now Facebook is looking to share what it has learned with the telecommunications industry.
During Mobile World Congress 2016, Facebook announced its Telecom Infra Project, which is billed as “an engineering-focused initiative driven by operators, equipment providers, system integrators and other technology companies that aims to reimagine the traditional approach to building and deploying telecom network infrastructure.”
This approach is very similar to the Open Compute Project, of which Facebook is a primary member. OCP provides a forum for companies to share technical specifications and other formerly proprietary information.
According to Facebook, “we know from our experience with the Open Compute Project that openness and collaboration can help everyone move faster in unlocking new efficiencies and new innovation.” Facebook’s TIP includes early members like Deutsche Telecom, Nokia, Intel and SK Telecom.
SK Telecom “plans to contribute to TIP by sharing its industry-leading ‘5G’ enabling technologies/services, outstanding network solutions based on virtualization technologies like software-defined network and network functions virtualization.
Jason Taylor, VP of infrastructure at Facebook, said the collaborative effort is needed to meet “exponentially growing network demand while increasing access and lower costs. … We will all need to work together to make existing and next-generation building blocks more flexible and to accelerate the development and adoption of more efficient technologies. No one company has all the answers, but we believe that this open and collaborative approach will transform how networks are built and operated worldwide.”
Park Jin-hyo, SVP and head of network technology at SK Telecom’s research and development center, explained the Korean market demands necessitate a collaborative approach.
“The telecommunication industry needs a new pace of change,” Jin-hyo said. “Korea has the world’s highest LTE penetration rate, rapidly moving towards 5G. 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. It is our belief that TIP cooperation will open up a new possibility in this aspect and SK Telecom is keen on contributing to this project.”
