At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Facebook announced the launch of a new open source hardware effort to extend cellular wireless service and hopefully accelerate the scaling up of telecommunications infrastructure and the development of new wireless broadband technologies, including 5G wireless.
The program, called the Telecom Infra Project (TIP), is also 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.
Modeled on the Open Compute Project, which tackled data center computing and networking hardware, TIP already has 30 participating members (including a number of telecommunications and networking hardware providers alongside global and regional telecommunications carriers).
Read more at Ars Technica
