SK Telecom (NYSE:SKM) announced today that, together with Facebook, it will join the Telecom Infra Project (TIP) as a founding operator to drive innovations in telecommunications infrastructure and mobile services.

TIP is an engineer-focused initiative driven by operators, infrastructure providers, system integrators, and other technology companies that aims to reimagine the traditional approach to building and deploying telecom network infrastructure. TIP will explore new approaches and technologies across three initial focus areas: access, backhaul, and core and management. The project groups within these areas will leverage the unique engineering and operational expertise of each member, focusing on developing new technologies and exploring new approaches to deployment in both developed and emerging markets.

In the near term, TIP's work will focus primarily on disaggregating the hardware and software layers in the traditional network stack and recombining those elements in ways that enable significant efficiency gains in urban and rural deployments. TIP will also collaborate on the acceleration of technologies like 5G and the development of new technologies that will pave the way for better connectivity and richer services. In this work, TIP will build on technology and knowledge contributions from its founding members and operators.

TIP is joined by representative telecommunications companies of countries across the world, like Deutsche Telekom (Germany), and global leading technology companies and telecom infrastructure providers like Facebook, Nokia, and Intel. TIP members will collaborate to accelerate the development of new telecommunications infrastructure technologies and bring the best innovative approaches to production network deployment.

SK Telecom plans to contribute to TIP by sharing its industry-leading 5G enabling technologies/services, outstanding network solutions based on virtualization technologies like Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV).

Meanwhile, in January 2016, SK Telecom joined the Open Compute Project (OCP), an initiative for open source hardware and data center design. The company plans to present its progress at the OCP Summit to be held on March 9, 2016 in San Jose, U.S.

"Facebook is excited to work through TIP with some of the industry’s best engineering and operational talent to improve connectivity worldwide. The challenge of meeting exponentially growing network demand while increasing access and lowering costs has never been greater. We will all need to work together to make existing and next-generation building blocks more flexible and to accelerate the development and adoption of more efficient technologies. No one company has all the answers but we believe that this open and collaborative approach will transform how networks are built and operated worldwide." said Jason Taylor, Vice President of Infrastructure, Facebook.

“The telecommunication industry needs a new pace of change. Korea has the world’s highest LTE penetration rate, rapidly moving towards 5G. To meet constantly changing customer demands in the upcoming 5G era and pursue the software-centric open architecture, we need a new way to revolutionize how the networks are built. It is our belief that TIP cooperation will open up a new possibility in this aspect and SK Telecom is keen on contributing to this project.” said Park Jin-hyo, SVP and Head of Network Technology R&D Center at SK Telecom.