Microsoft Corp. is among a number of new companies to sign up to Facebook Inc.’s one-year-old Telecom Infra Project, which is an attempt to repeat the success of the Open Compute Project in the telecommunications industry.

Microsoft, along with Facebook and other hyperscale Internet firms such as Amazon.com Inc. and Google Inc., has been investing heavily in telecommunications infrastructure for some years now. The companies all face the same problem in that their bandwidth needs have outgrown what existing networks can provide. As a result, they’ve been forced to take matters into their own hands by playing a role in the construction of new undersea cables and terrestrial fiber capacity.

On Monday at the Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona, Microsoft was announced as one of several new members of the Telecom Infra Project, alongside Bharti Airtel Ltd., BT Group Plc, Dish Network LLC, Emirates Telecommunications Corp. and Nextel Communications Inc.

The TIP, launched in February 2016, is modeled on the Open Compute Project, which open-sources data center designs and makes them available to companies looking to build out their computing infrastructure. At the time of the launch, Facebook’s global head of engineering and infrastructure Jay Parikh explained that the scaling-out of telecom infrastructure wasn’t moving as fast as it needed to. The TIP is designed to get every company with a stake to work together to drive a faster pace of innovation in telecom infrastructure, he added.

As such, it’s important to get the big players like Microsoft on board. The software giant is one of the most important members of the original OCP initiative, to which it signed up in January 2014, years ahead of Apple Inc., Google and others. It’s also one of the biggest hyperscalers in the world, and as such its expertise in telco infrastructure should provide a significant boost to the TIP’s efforts.

The TIP is focused on improving three layers of the telecommunications network, namely access, backhaul and core and management. Similar to the OCP, the TIP follows a basic principle of disaggregation, which means using interoperable components that can easily be swapped out and replaced, in favor of proprietary, vertically integrated systems.

As part of today’s news, the TIP said one of its first pieces of technology, the Voyager optical transponder, is being deployed for testing by France’s Orange S.A. over its optical transport network, and by the Scandinavian firm Telia Company AB as part of its longhaul fiber network. Equinix Inc., a data center company and also a member of the TIP, launched the first trials involving Voyager in some of its facilities last year.

Meanwhile, newcomer BT is planning to launch the second and third TIP Ecosystem Acceleration Centers in London and Adastral Park, which is the company’s main research center in Suffolk, England. The first center was established last year by SK Telecom Co. Ltd. in Seoul, South Korea.

Image: MichaelGaida/Pixabay