As Telecom Infra Project (TIP), originally set up by Facebook as a network equivalent of its Open Compute Project, has become intertwined with the open RAN movement, its work on connecting the ‘next billion’ is sometimes overshadowed in the industry mind. Open RAN certainly addresses improved economics for rural build-out, but is part of a wider bid to shake up the RAN architecture and ecosystem, largely driven by major operators. Facebook’s original and continuing focus, however, is often on communities that have hardly been touched by cellular operators at all, and are unlikely to prove commercially attractive unless a new approach to networks and service providers is enabled. This is where platforms like Terragraph, a 60 GHz reference platform developed…