The Telecom Infra Project (TIP) announced that Santiago Tenorio, Vodafone Group’s head of network strategy and architecture and current TIP board member, will succeed Axel Clauberg as chairman of TIP.
Tenorio has been a member of the TIP board since 2017. His role at Vodafone is to drive the network strategy across all markets, defining the architecture and selecting global vendors. At the TIP Summit in Amsterdam in November 2019, Tenorio made the big announcement that Vodafone will issue a request for quotes (RFQ) for open RAN technology for its entire European footprint. “That’s significantly more than 100,000 sites, and all the technologies are to tender — 2G, 3G, 4G, and 5G,” said Tenorio at the summit. “We’ve invited the incumbent suppliers in Europe of course, but we’ve also invited the open RAN suppliers.”
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Commenting on his new appointment, Tenorio said, "Over the past four years, 45 technology innovations have come from TIP. As chair, I will champion continued innovation and the opening up of supplier ecosystems to more competition.”
TIP was founded by Facebook in 2016 with the broad goal of bringing internet connectivity to unserved areas of the world. And it’s done innovative things, such as its Terragraph project, which uses 60 GHz millimeter wave spectrum and multi-hop, multi-point wireless technology to deliver fiber-like speeds at a lower cost than fiber.
But Clauberg led the charge for telcos to become heavily involved in TIP. As a technology executive at Deutsche Telekom, Clauberg worked with leaders from Vodafone and Telefonica, among others, in order to develop software-powered telecom infrastructure. At an SDN and NFV event in 2017, Clauberg expressed irritation that everyone thought of TIP as a Facebook project. He said, “It’s not the Facebook Infra Project; it’s the Telecom Infra Project.”
Clauberg recently left Deutsche Telekom to join Amazon Web Services in Germany as a solutions architects leader.
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Over the past four years TIP has worked on innovation across all elements of the network including access, transport, core and services, developing use cases for urban to rural areas. TIP recently announced that Rakuten Mobile and Dell joined the organization’s more than 500 members.