Now the dust has settled on last week’s TIP Summit 2018, in London, we’ve had time to reflect on our involvement in the project so far and the future.

The Telecom Infra Project (TIP) was launched in February 2016 with the aim of “accelerating the pace of innovation in the telecom industry” through collaborative means. Blu Wireless Technology first became involved with TIP last year and attended the TIP summit in Santa Clara last November which covered technologies like OpenCellular, OpenRAN, vRAN, Edge Computing, Open Optical Packet Transport as well as mmWave.

Specifically, our involvement is focused in the mmWave Group, whose objective is to define and advance mmWave wireless networking solutions to address the growing demand for bandwidth in dense areas in collaboration with companies like ourselves who operate in this space.

Collaboration

So far, through collaboration we have built interesting relationships with mobile network operators, learning about challenges they face and the requirements for technology that we will provide for them. Openness and ecosystem collaboration in this regard will help us tailor what we develop to meet their needs, while the general spirit of collaborative working has felt refreshing as we aim to further the development of the industry as a whole.

Alongside SiversIMA, our radio partner and another leading developer and manufacturer of mmWave products, we showcased a point-to-multi-point (P2MP) demo with 1xPCP & 2xSTA + Wi-Fi access point at this year’s TIP Summit in London last week. This powerful collaboration demonstrated the balance between system performance and power efficiency needed to enable commercial solutions for mmWave applications such as small cell backhaul, fixed wireless broadband access and multiple emerging 5G applications.

HYDRA 1 System IP and the future

Of course, the function of mmWave technology is to achieve “always on” connectivity with connected gadgets, devices, applications and objects powered by the internet becoming further integrated into our lives. Technology that is robust enough to keep pace with these developments, such as higher throughputs and lower latency to support 5G network applications (Fixed Wireless Broadband, Last 100m & small cell backhaul) that are cost efficient, are required.

However, “always on” connectivity cannot be achieved when certain geographical locations, both in the Global South and the developed world are neglected. We believe we can help by being an IP provider, since HYDRA IP, already designed and in mass production, is compliant with many of the new specifications for IEEE 802.11ay manufacturers. By filling this role, partners can save significant design and implementation costs, simply by becoming a Blu Wireless licensee. This will be important too, given the challenges of getting permits and scheduled hours of access to implement the technology in urban areas, which is an already expensive process.

TIP 2018

Being involved in this year’s TIP summit, has been a great opportunity to display the progress we have made being part of TIP and our contributions in terms of interoperability and mmWave performance. Bringing international telecom and internet industry leaders together can only be a learning experience and we hope to work increasingly closely with initiatives such as TIP to eventually achieve “always on” connectivity.