Telenor Group joins Facebook-led Telecom Infra Project

Telenor Group has joined the Telecom Infra Project (TIP). The global mobile operator will contribute to two TIP project groups focused on wireless networking: OpenCellular and mmWave.

Telenor announced the news at a press event at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona today.

"Driving the industry towards more openness is important for the ecosystem, as well as for Telenor Group, in order to pursue efficiency, innovation and attractive service experience. We are excited to collaborate with the world's leading telecom operators, infrastructure providers and system integrators in TIP to trial open base stations in Pakistan and Terragraph in Malaysia," said Ruza Sabanovic, chief technology officer for Telenor Group.

Telenor Group's engagements in TIP will focus on selected trials on defining and advancing 60 GHz wireless networking solutions (mmWave/Terragraph) in Malaysia, and open systems for base stations (OpenCellular) in Pakistan. These trials are planned for those two markets in the first phase to gain practical experience on performance and future opportunities, Telenor stated.

Founded in 2016 by Facebook, Deutsche Telekom and others, the Telecom Infra Project is an engineering-focused initiative driven by operators, suppliers, developers, integrators, and startups to disaggregate the traditional network deployment approach. The collective aim of the TIP community is to collaborate on new technologies, examine new business approaches and spur new investments into the telecom space.

"Collaborating with global operators such as Telenor Group is key to our goal of helping to bring more people online," said Chris Daniels, VP of Connectivity at Facebook. "We're excited to see the momentum around solutions like Terragraph and OpenCellular, which we're deploying with members of the TIP community."

Key results of the trials will be contributed to the TIP community to enable further improvements of the technical solutions. In addition, working with other members of TIP will broaden the set of potential partners and industry insight that guides Telenor's technical roadmaps, Telenor stated in its release.

"We welcome Telenor Group to the TIP community and are looking forward to their contributions to the mmWave Networks and OpenCellular project groups," said Axel Clauberg, TIP chairman and vice president, Technology Innovation, Deutsche Telekom AG. "TIP is seeing strong momentum as more global operators join us and work to develop and trial new approaches to traditional network deployment."

Telenor Group is a leading telecommunications company with 178 million mobile subscribers and annual revenues of around $16 billion (2017). The Group has mobile operations in 12 markets across Europe and Asia, and fixed and broadcast operations in Scandinavia.