Incubation at speed: getting telecom start-ups into business

• One of TelecomTV’s favourite issues is around start-ups and the difficulties they encounter in trying to gain entry to the telecom ecosystem
• Late last month we ran a story on the Telecom Infra Project’s TIP Ecosystem Acceleration Centers (TEACs) and their anticipated role in fostering technical  innovation 
• We talked with Marina Traversari, Global Programme Lead for TEAC, about how to jump the barriers

The TIP idea is to incubate start-ups by providing them with lots of facilities and advice. That may sound like a familiar story (see - How to get your startup into the telecoms ecosystem).  but  advocates claim the TEAC model has a chance to improve on the performance of past incubators, mostly because it is aimed at fostering disaggregated telecoms technology and focuses on specific projects. These are supposed to turn around quickly, via trials and PoCs, and emerge with a commercial story and a good chance of becoming a part of the global telecoms ecosystem.  ( see - Innovation in the Telecoms Ecosystem Part 2). 

There are currently three operational TEACs, one each in Germany, Korea and the UK, with more on way. The German TEAC has held a judging day last month and now, after due consideration, five innovative start-ups have been selected to join TIP’s Ecosystem Accelerator Centers.

The five selected start-ups are... 

Swim.ai  

Swim.ai is an open core, end-to-end platform for continuous intelligence at scale. Swim.ai offers Swim Continuum, the first open core, enterprise-grade platform for building, managing and operating continuous intelligence applications.

ng-voice

ng-voice is a fully cloud-native and standard-compliant IMS core enabling voice on any 4G, 5G or other data-only networks. Its product portfolio includes its vIMS core, ePDG, PCRF, HSS, OCS and application servers (e.g. MMTel, LI, SR-VCC). As an independent Europe-based software supplier and GSMA member, founded by a team of leading VoIP pioneers, ng-voice helps operators deploy a tailored, virtualized, and commercially attractive voice core.

EdgeInfra

EdgeInfra provides neutral micro-datacenter and colocation services at the ultra-local edge of fixed and mobile network infrastructure in Europe. EdgeInfra’s micro-datacenters is a solution for edge computing, storage, and interconnection for content distribution and data-processing to the user for IoT as well as edge processing for traffic and mobility, gaming, digital health, and smart city platforms as and AI, AR, and VR applications.

Shoelace Wireless

An android app that speeds up mobile internet by combining Wi-Fi and cellular networks. The start-up develops cooperative networking technologies that enable a mobile user to aggregate all wireless networks available to a single mobile device and/or on multiple nearby devices. It uses a patented approach that is software-only and requires no changes to the current communication infrastructure.

Rapid.Space

Rapid.Space is aHyper Open cloud provider offering Virtual Private Servers (VPS), Content Delivery Network (CDN) and global IPv6 (SDN). Rapid.Space is a service of Nexedi SA, the largest publisher of Open Source / Free Software in Europe with 15 million lines of original source code.