It is almost four years since Facebook initiated the Telecom Infra Project (TIP), with the goal of extending the scalable cloud-based economics of its Open Compute Project to the telecoms networks. It has expanded well beyond the social media giant and its goals of bringing affordable connectivity to ‘the next billion’, though the overall objective of achieving a fully open, disaggregated network on cloud infrastructure remains the same. Large operators, especially European leaders like Deutsche Telekom, Telefónica, BT and Vodafone have become very active, as they seek to open up their supply chains and drive network costs down for the 5G era. At the TIP Summit in Amsterdam last week, it was clear how far the group has progressed. A…