Why Facebook is interested in TIP?

http://uk.businessinsider.com/inside-facebooks-telecom-
infrastructure-project-2017-5
On an ordinary workday in mid-2016, a handful of Facebook
engineers were sitting on the couches in a corner of the company's
Menlo Park, California, headquarters when one of them tossed out a
wacky idea.
He suggested doing something that had never been done before and
could upend the $350 billion telecommunication market.
"It can't be so difficult to build our own system," the engineer said,
referring to the telecom equipment that sends data across cables and
wireless networks, a system that could be faster, yet cost less, than the
pricey equipment sold by big vendors like Huawei, Ericsson, Cisco, or
Juniper Networks.
The engineer was suggesting building the telecom industry's first
"white box" transponder, made with off-the-shelf parts such as chips
from Broadcom and Acacia Communications, optical equipment from
Lumentum, and software from one of the many new networking
startups cropping up these days
Schmidtke (Director of Engineering Facebook) agreed to help this tiny
group hack together a white-box system at one of Facebook's
hackathons. Three months later the group had a working prototype.
Six months later, on November 1, the company announced it to the
world as a real product called Voyager.
https://code.facebook.com/posts/1977308282496021/an-open-
approach-for-switching-routing-and-transport/
The product's unveiling sent shockwaves through the telecom
industry, putting gear makers on notice that the lucrative market they
controlled for decades was about to get turned upside down — and not
necessarily to their advantage.
The effort is essentially Facebook, a social-networking company whose
bread-and-butter business is online advertising, taking control of its
own technical destiny. And the stakes could not be higher for the
telecom equipment companies that risk seeing their products
become commodities.
Voyager has already been tested by Facebook and the European
telecom company Telia over Telia's thousand-kilometer-telecom
network. Plus, the German telecom equipment maker ADVA Optical
Networking is manufacturing the device and as of a few weeks ago had
nine customers trying it out for their telecom needs, a mix of big
telecom companies and enterprises, it said. And the Paris-based
telecom provider Orange is also testing the device, working with
Equinix and the African telecom company MTN.
"We pulled it off essentially showing that when a few engineers can
build a system within six months, the world has changed," Schmidtke
said.
One person told us that Schmidtke, who is insanely proud of Voyager,
has become a star in his own corner of the tech world. When he and
his team "go to conferences, they treat him like a tech celebrity, like a
rock band," that person said.

About TIP -
TIP is a spin-off from a similar organization Facebook launched a few
years ago called the Open Compute Project.
Facebook launched OCP and TIP because it sought to take control of
the technology used to support its over 1.8 billion peoplee uploading
billions of photos, videos, and updates every day
Facebook has been designing its own IT equipment for years, things
like computer servers, hard drives or storage systems, and data-center
networks. Its versions were cheaper to build and easier to maintain
than standard gear made by companies like Dell, HP, EMC, and Cisco,
it says.
Lots of big internet companies build their own tech, including Amazon
and Google. But Facebook is unusual in that it openly shares all the
designs, literally gives them all away free, inviting anyone at any other
company to come work on them, with contract manufacturers
standing by to sell it all. It's a concept called open-source hardware.
In this way, Facebook gets lots of help in maintaining and advancing
its infrastructure. And the rest of the world gets access to tech
designed to work in the most demanding circumstances, like at a huge
internet company.
OCP has radically changed the data-center tech industry, and those
involved say it has created a cult-like following. For instance, when the
secretive Apple refused to join OCP to let its IT engineers collaborate
with others, its crew of network engineers quit their jobs. They turned
around and launched a startup called SnapRoute and built network
software for the OCP community, the story goes. Apple later joined
OCP. SnapRoute wound up being the software chosen for Voyager.
OCP created so much competition for hardware vendors like Hewlett
Packard and Dell that they opted to join the organization and embrace
the white-box concept. The alternative was to be squeezed out of
selling their products to companies with the biggest and fastest-
growing data centers in the world — not just Facebook but Microsoft,
Goldman Sachs, and dozens of others.
There was just one major area that had been somewhat left out of
OCP's free and open-source hardware revolution: the
telecommunications part. That's the equipment that connects homes,
businesses, and data centers across long distances via undersea cables,
wireless networks, and so on.
And the big telecom companies, those that spend millions of dollars a
year on this gear, wanted in. They were seeking an OCP of their own,
Facebook discovered when it launched its Internet.org, CEO Mark
Zuckerberg's project to bring internet to underdeveloped countries.
"As we were thinking about Internet.org and helping get more people
connected, the idea was, we're doing this thing called OCP to help the
data-center community to build infrastructure that's more efficient,
more cost-effective, that's greener and more sustainable, more
flexible. And we said, can we do that for the telco industry?"
Facebook's vice president of engineering, Jay Parikh, said.
"Facebook, having learned from OCP, comes in and says, we can play
maybe a catalyzing function," Parikh said, describing early meetings
he and his crew had at Mobile World Congress. "We're investing our
people and our dollars into technology that is going to solve these
problems, and we're going to contribute that technology, that IP," or
intellectual property, "into the ecosystem so that you all can benefit
from this."
Voyager is one big example. "That's something we developed and it's
like, wow, we actually solved a problem that a bunch of operators
seem to be struggling with," he said.

Signing on huge partners

Alex Choi, the chief technology officer of South Korea's SK Telecom,
agrees that telecom operators like SKT want faster, cheaper, and more
open equipment and were inspired by Facebook to take it into their
own hands.
In 2015 and 2016, Zuckerberg came to the MWC conference, gave
keynote speeches, and hung out with top telecom executives.
He wanted to know what was keeping those people off the internet. He
discovered that bringing telecom services to far-out parts of the world
"was too expensive" for telecom operators, Choi recalls.
Facebook wanted to help bring the costs down. But developed nations
in Europe, Asia, and the Americas had the same problem. People are
buying more devices, using more video. And with the Internet of
Things, millions more objects are joining the internet daily,
communicating over telecom networks.
There's a huge growing traffic demand," Choi said. "That means we
have to install more base stations, find more sites, invest more in the
fiber and the backbone and supporting IT infrastructure." But telecom
companies can't charge more to cover the costs. People are pushing
them to charge less, for unlimited data plans.

And there's one more issue going on besides tight budgets and huge
growth, he said: the war for talent. Decades ago, hardware and
communications engineers went to the telecom companies to build
amazing new things, like mobile networks. Then they went to the tech
companies like Cisco to build the tech that created the internet. Today,
they are going directly to the internet companies like Google and
Facebook and creating new hardware so they don't have to rely on the
vendors, he said.
Clauberg joined TIP as a founding board member, alongside SKT's
Choi. This was a powerful first step. SDK and DT are two of the most
advanced telcos in the world, role models for many others. Facebook
also persuaded Intel's Caroline Chan to join TIP, which was an easy
sell. Intel is also a founding member of OCP. And TIP was off and
running.
But there was one surprise founding member of TIP: Nokia's Laurent
Le Gourrierec.

Why Nokia Joined TIP?

Telecom devices that can be put together with standard parts and
software are deeply threatening to the multibillion-dollar telecom
equipment market dominated by companies like Huawei
Technologies, Ericsson, Cisco, ZTE, and Nokia.
And Voyager isn't the only product. TIP's OpenCellular project is
working on an open-source 4G LTE/LTE base station, the hardware
and the software.
But there are other equipment makers that are, technically, part of TIP
too. Currently the organization boasts more than 100 members from
all facets of the industry.
But Choi, Clauberg, and Le Gourrierec said many of them had only
been nervously watching the group so far.
"They are not actively contributing," Le Gourrierec said.
As SKT's Choi describes it, TIP wants to "democratize" the technology,
making it easier for anyone to build, use, or modify. That means
taking it out of the hands of the equipment providers who create
proprietary radios and base stations today.
TIP's impact won't happen overnight, explains analyst Rohit Mehra,
the vice president of IDC's Network Infrastructure practice. But the
goal is clear: to overhaul the telecom equipment industry, which he
says is about a $350 billion market when factoring in software,
hardware, and services.
"This is not the first time Facebook has done this," Mehra says.
"They've been somewhat successful with what they call OCP. The
Telecom Infrastructure Project is disruptive not just to telecom-
equipment makers but in some cases the telecom service providers.
Though in some cases it helps the service providers because it intends
to give them more cost-effective infrastructure."
So TIP is, in some ways, threatening Nokia's main telecom business.
But Nokia is a close partner of Facebook and the one telecom
equipment vendor embracing TIP as a founding member and board
member.
Model of TIP –
Obviously, the kumbaya concept of open source doesn't work well like
that. Everyone has to contribute ideas for a community to blossom.
One way TIP is encouraging them to jump in is a different approach to
sharing intellectual property. Participants don't have to give away all
their closely held, lucrative ideas and secrets the way they do with
OCP or with other open-source organizations like Linux.
Each working group in TIP can instead decide to use an older, more
established method for sharing, known as Reasonable And Non-
Discriminatory Terms. RAND allows vendors to be paid tiny fees by
everyone who uses their intellectual property as long as those fees are
reasonable and the tech is made available to everyone without bias.
The company can't, for instance, jack up the price to its competitors.
The TIP board members are also encouraging participation by telling
members that TIP will lead to plenty of other new commercial
opportunities, too, even if TIP successfully turns the hardware into
low-cost generic white boxes. Teleco providers can instead develop
new software that can be bought via lucrative subscriptions, similar to
the software startups that have sprouted up around OCP.
In fact, Nokia is already experimenting with a high-performance
software product able to run on low-cost, ordinary computer network
hardware. It's geared toward businesses, not service providers, but it's
a start, Le Gourrierec tells us.
TIP is also encouraging engineers and companies to join by creating a
"culture" working group that helps teach telecom engineers how to
"work fast and break things" as the internet world does.
"One of things we learned in the last 1.5 years in working on TIP is
people saying, 'How do you help me transform my culture and my
team so that we can move faster?'" Facebook's Parikh said.
Telecom is a world that traditionally frowned on that. Working fast
and breaking things could take down the network and get you fired.
The culture group has become a popular entry point for engineers
wanting to check out TIP. They then bring these ideas back to their
jobs. It helps some engineers become more open-minded about
sharing. For others, like Le Gourrierec, it inspires "a new sense of
urgency," in his work at Nokia, he describes.
Facebook turns stronger with TIP?
Facebook is making equipment with TIP and OCP, it has state-of-the-
art data centers, it has a roster of talented engineers, and it is also
laying its own telecom cable, including a new record-breaking fast
subsea cable installed with Nokia between New York and Ireland.
It could snap its fingers and become a powerful telecom and cloud
operator tomorrow, some people fear (and others predict) as Amazon
did with Amazon Web Services or Google did with Google Cloud and
Google Fiber.
But Parikh said Facebook had zero interest in doing that. "We aren't
operating any networks ourselves. We are trying to help the telcos
solve this," he said. The idea is to "share" lessons and technology to
"always benefits" the whole community.
SKT's Choi just shrugs off the idea that Facebook is a threat, saying
telecom operators have more to gain than to lose.
"I can understand the concern. It's very much natural, because
operators are always being disrupted," he said, especially by large
American internet companies "like Amazon, Google, and Facebook."
"But in the long run, I strongly believe in mutual benefits," he said. He
notes that because Amazon helped create cloud computing, there are
new billion-dollar markets and "everyone benefits." He added: "I think
the same thing will happen in the teleco sectors."
Not everyone is convinced that TIP will succeed. IDC's Mehra cautions
that it's a huge undertaking and the two biggest telecom equipment
vendors, Ericsson and Huawei, have remained cool toward the project,
for obvious reasons, he says.
"TIP may see progress over the years. But the challenges are higher.
They are working on four to five different domains of telecom
infrastructure, each with its own set of technologies and own set of
tech providers," Mehra says.
All the board members of TIP acknowledge that the project is in its
early days and could fail. It could fail to attract a community. It could
fail to produce products the world wants to use.
But they believe it will succeed.
"Today most telcos remain as the status quo, but all the telcos
leadership, if you ask them, they want transformation," he said. "They
want changes. They want innovation. They have to overcome it by
collaborating with Facebook and others. Again, witness all the
innovations that have already happened in the cloud industry. We
want to apply all those innovations to the telco industry, which will
make operators happier and customer happier and for everyone, a
win/win."

How ONAP , TIP and other projects are interrelated?

http://www.fiercewireless.com/wireless/linux-foundation-zeros-
harmonizing-open-source-standards
The debate over whether standards or open source will prevail is no longer the
issue—instead a new white paper published by The Linux Foundation seeks to
examine how they can live in harmony.

Put another way, “there’s a place for standards and there’s a place for open source,
and the two of them can be the best of friends,” said Arpit Joshipura, the general
manager of The Linux Foundation’s Networking & Orchestration department who
was hired last year to help harmonize the open source networking ecosystem.

And there’s a lot to harmonize, considering the open source networking ecosystem
includes quite a few initiatives, including OpenDaylight, OPNFV, FD.io, Open
vSwitch, OpenSwitch, IO Visor, ON.Lab, CORD and ONOS. That’s just the Linux
projects; efforts are underway outside the Linux Foundation, as well as various
standards bodies.

One of the goals of the white paper was to educate the world on how intellectual
property or solutions are created, how they differ in open source and open standards
and how they can work together. “It’s nothing more than an educational attempt for
us,” he said. “We want to make sure the community understands how they all fit
together.”

Included in the white paper is a slide (featured above) that Joshipura created to
illustrate all the different layers. Presented at the Open Networking Summit in Santa
Clara, California, last month, the slide shows the Open Compute Project (OCP) and
Telecom Infra Project (TIP) at the bottom. Both of those initiatives are driving
designs in hardware, with TIP, run by Facebook, considered a sister project to OCP,
which includes Facebook, Nokia, Ericsson, Apple, Google and more. Above them
are the myriad open source software initiatives underway.
One may argue that there are so many projects going on, something needs to give,
but each of the projects has a goal and while they go about achieving it slightly
differently, some are quite complementary.

“When we say harmonization, it’s not that this picture is going to look like one big
block of software,” he said. “We do need choices and we do need a broad variety of
use cases. But what we would like to avoid is isolation in each of these. So the first
step is do we understand how each of these projects are complementary in nature. If
not, that’s one of my roles to bring that out to the community.”

The second step is to ask whether they interoperate and the third revolves around
whether the projects are overlapping, and if so, they may be candidates for merging.

A classic example is ONAP. There was a project called open source ECOMP
underway at AT&T and the Linux Foundation had OPEN-O, which was backed by a
lot of companies in China. They identified overlap between the two, and the decision
was made to bring the two together and merge them as ONAP.

Considering the pace of change, it's no wonder there's a need for hamonization. Five
years ago, open source networking was in its infancy, and "then all of a sudden it
started gaining traction and the last couple of years have been really phenomenal for
open source networking in terms of the community and the projects," he said.

As these components started coming together, The Linux Foundation realized

there’s a need to provide not just direction to the community in technical and
architectural ways but to provide support and guidance on how they will come
together—“so that we don’t end up with 50, hundred projects and then end user gets
confused,” he said.

Having spent part of his career on the vendor side, working in open source as well
as standards and doing engineering, Joshipura embraced the opportunity to take on
the challenge that his new job offers.

The next five years are critical for the networking industry as open source gets
adopted, and “we’ve got to get it right because once that happens, you will see a
whole different way of how we consume services,” he said.

At the recent Open Networking Summit, the SDN/NFV community convened in

Santa Clara to share, learn, collaborate, and network about one of the most
pervasive industry transformations of our time.

The Linux Foundation

This year’s theme at ONS was “Harmonize, Harness, and Consume,” representing
a significant turning point as network operators spanning telecommunications,
cable, enterprise, cloud, and the research community renew their efforts to redefine
the network architecture.
Widespread new technology adoption takes years to succeed, and requires close
collaboration among those producing network technology and those consuming it.
Traditionally, standards development organizations (SDOs) have played a critical
role in offering a forum for discussion and debate, and well-established processes
for systematically standardizing and verifying new technologies.
Introduction of largely software (vs. hardware) functionality necessitates a
rethinking of the conventional technology adoption lifecycle. In a software driven
world, it is infeasible to define a priori complex reference architectures and
software platforms without a more iterative approach. As a result, industry has
been increasingly turning to open source communities for implementation
expertise and feedback.
In this new world order, closer collaboration among the SDOs, industry groups,
and open source projects is needed to capitalize upon each constituent’s strengths:
 SDOs provide operational expertise and well-defined processes for technology
definition, standardization, and validation
 Industry groups offer innovative partnerships between network operators and
their vendors to establish open reference architectures that are guiding the
future of the industry
 Open source projects provide technology development expertise and
infrastructure that are guided by end-user use cases, priorities, and
requirements
Traditionally each of these groups operates relatively autonomously, liaising
formally and informally primarily for knowledge sharing.
Moving ahead, close coordination is essential to better align individual
organizations objectives, priorities, and plans. SDN/NFV are far too pervasive for
any single group to own or drive. As a result, the goal is to capitalize upon the
unique strengths of each to accelerate technology adoption.
It is in the spirit of such harmonization that The Linux Foundation is pleased to
unveil an industry-wide call to action to achieve this goal.
As a first step, we are issuing a white paper, “Harmonizing Open Source and
Standards in the Telecom World,” to outline the key concepts, and invite an
unprecedented collaboration among the SDOs, open source projects, and industry
groups that each play a vital role in the establishment of a sustainable ecosystem
which is essential for success.
The introduction of The Linux Foundation Open Network Automation Platform
(ONAP) is a tangible step in the direction of harmonization, not only merging
OPEN-O and the open source ECOMP communities, but also establishing a
platform that by its nature as an orchestration and automation platform, must
inherently integrate with a diverse set of standards, open source projects, and
reference architectures.
We invite all in the community to participate in the process, in a neutral
environment, where the incentives for all are to work together vs. pursue their own
paths.