Tanaza joins Telecom Infra Project’s WiFi Project Group

The Telecom Infra Project is a collaborative telecom community, launched in February 2016, with the goal of accelerating the pace of innovation in the telecom industry. TIP believes that accelerating innovation coupled with new business approaches and cost efficiencies will help the industry build the networks of the future and create business opportunities for new and existing companies, alike.

TIP’s Project Groups are divided into three strategic network areas that collectively make up an end-to-end network: Access, Backhaul, and Core and Management. The WiFi Project Group, co-chaired by Deutsche Telekom and Facebook, is one of the Access Project Groups, which are working to identify and create innovative infrastructure solutions, technologies and methodologies that make it easier to connect people to the internet.

The main goal of the WiFi Project Group is to encourage collaboration, exploration, and standardization among organizations deploying WiFi, service providers and infrastructure vendors.

The WiFi Project Group will work on improving wireless Internet connectivity and in pursuing opportunities to deploy innovative technologies and business models for WiFi deployments. The emphasis will be on bringing solutions to the market in the shortest possible time frame, leveraging the collective leadership, expertise, and influence of project group members.

The WiFi Project Group’s vision is to build an active ecosystem for WiFi network vendors, operators, and other interested parties that will work together to deploy innovative WiFi solutions.

Tanaza will contribute to the Telecom Infra Project’s WiFi project with its latest innovation, TanazaOS, a Linux-based operating system for centralized wireless network management.

TanazaOS, which can run on virtually any white-box and a wide variety of off-the-shelf networking devices, gives enterprises and WiFi operators an unprecedented possibility to decouple their hardware choice from their software choice, maximizing operational efficiency and interoperability, and delivering considerable cost savings in terms of CAPEX and OPEX.

TanazaOS is conceived around the disaggregation concept, which means offering users the option to select software from one vendor and run it on hardware from a different manufacturer.

Within the Wi-Fi Project Group, Tanaza could contribute in two ways:

1. By conforming TanazaOS to the standardized set of APIs, and by helping to foster interoperability among vendors, supporting affordable off-the-shelf Wi-Fi access points.
2. By standardizing the features provided by access points from different vendors through a centralized cloud-based platform to make Wi-Fi networks less expensive and easier to manage and operate.

Since our OS is 99.9% Linux-based that takes from and gives back to the Open Source community, we think TanazaOS could become an open source NOS in the long term, transitioning from a commercial NOS business model that empowers third-party hardware, to what Red Hat is known for. Philosophically speaking, we are thrilled by this possibility, but we are realistic, and we acknowledge that for this transition to happen it would require a significant installed base and copious funding.

We are open not only in terms of the hardware we support, but also open to ideas, and we are thrilled to have the opportunity to collaborate with ecosystem partners through the TIP community to support the whole Wi-Fi ecosystem and make connectivity more democratic.

About Tanaza

Tanaza S.p.A. was founded in 2010 in Milan (Italy), with the goal of disrupting the WiFi market thanks to the opportunity created by the Wi-Fi hardware commoditization trend.

Tanaza is currently introducing its latest innovation: TanazaOS, a Linux-based operating system for centralized wireless network management. TanazaOS is conceived around the disaggregation concept, which means offering the option to select software from one vendor and run it on hardware from a different manufacturer.

For more information visit https://www.tanaza.com.