Facebook has announced the Telecom Infra Project, which will look at developing new and alternative technologies to build and deploy telecom infrastructure, with partners including Aricent, HCL Technologies, Intel, Nokia and T- Mobile. The Project is working on providing currently unserved rural communities with wireless network efforts. A pilot 4G network is already underway in the Philippines, and Facebook has a project in planning for the Scottish Highlands.

TIP will focus on open designs for three areas of telecommunications hardware and software: access points, the backhaul network to connect them, and network core and management systems. Facebook said TIP members will contribute designs in three areas- access, back haul, and core and management. TIP will apply the design principles of the Open Compute Project, which is a Facebook project to share data centre designs.

Facebook and Philippines’ telecom company Globe recently deployed a pilot technology based on TIP principles to connect a small village in the Philippines that previously did not have cellular coverage. The new technologies developed and tested with different partners of the TIP project will be shared with the rest of the community.

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