Turkcell has become the latest operator to join the Facebook-led Telecoms Infrastructure Project (TIP), saying it wants to help expand and speed up network deployments.
The Turkish telco joins a bustling group of more than 500 operators, vendors, integrators and start-ups that have joined since Facebook, Deutsche Telekom, Intel, Nokia and SK Telecom formed TIP last year.
The operator’s CEO Kaan Terzioglu said he was looking forward to “reimagining the traditional approach to building and deploying telecom network infrastructure”.
He said: “Joining this important global effort will also enable us to quickly bring new and innovative technologies to Turkey by contributing to the development of the next generation of open solutions for cost effective, efficient and flexible networks.
“As the world’s first digital operator we believe our unique perspective can help TIP achieve its mission to rapidly expand network deployments needed to meet the world’s ever-growing demand for connectivity.
“We believe that TIP will help close the digital divide and promote greater inclusion, and we call our regional and industry peers to join us in this important initiative.”
There was no detail about the specific areas Turkcell will be working on.
TIP Executive Director Leland Lai added: “The addition of Turkcell to our growing list of top global operators is another clear sign of TIP’s growing momentum.
“We look forward to working with Turkcell and are excited that they can share the insights and lessons they learned from their digital transition with the TIP community.”
TIP held a summit in California last week where it announced a glut of new projects and breakthroughs.
These included Deutsche Telekom and Telefónica co-chairing a new Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learnng group aimed at using the technology to predict network faults and take action to avoid them.
Other work includes projects across Latin America and Africa to deploy Facebook’s open-source wireless access platform OpenCellular.
