On February 21 2016 Facebook made an announcement about the launch of what will be known as the Telecom Infra Project. This project is a partnership with firms including Deutsche Telekom, SK Telecom, Nokia and Intel. The initiative was created to help build the next generation of wireless networks. The creation of an ultra-fast 5G network has been in the news recently with plans of having similar networks featured in the 2018 World cup in Russia and the 2018 Winter Olympics in South Korea.
A 5G network however isn’t expected to be fully developed till 2019 at the earliest. Nonetheless, Facebook and the companies listed above are making plans on speeding the development process by making the designing of wireless networking equipment open source. Through the sharing of information, companies would be able to speed up their production rate and thereby build new network capabilities faster.
While it may seem strange for a social media company to be involved creating mobile telecom networks, Facebook has already shown interest in this field with its Open Compute project. Founded in 2011, the Open Compute project is a project whereby the designs for Facebook data centers and those of its large scale networks were published to the public for open source use. This resulted in an acceleration in development of efficient networking infrastructure that is now in use by Microsoft and Goldman Sachs. Facebook is therefore aiming for similar success in the world of telecommunication in regards to its foray into 5G network development.