African operator MTN Group struck a partnership with the Telecom Infra Project (TIP) to aid the evolution of its communication transport infrastructure, which will be aimed at supporting traffic growth over the next three years.

In a statement, MTN said the partnership would also provide support for new services, “as part of the evolution of 5G and enterprise services”, while reducing the time to market through more “focused” agile service provisioning.

A partnership with TIP provides further indication of MTN’s push towards open RAN infrastructure, after it outlined plans in November 2019 to deploy 5,000 sites across its network using the technology.

TIP promotes a software-based approach for building traditional networks over common hardware equipment, and has been gathering momentum among operators over the past year in particular.

TIP’s chief engineer David Hutton explained that “through the use of open protocols and interfaces, and the ability to incorporate specific innovations focused on the performance of each network component, TIP’s open disaggregated, standard-based transport networks can help MTN move closer to its ideal transport infrastructure”.

MTN added that the TIP community, which aggregates its members across the whole transport network value chain, was a key tool for MTN going forward.

The African operator said it will work together with the community in the months ahead, to build products and network configurations addressing its requirements.

Source: Mobileworldlive