Synphonya S.r.l., an innovative start-up based in Turin, Italy, working in the field of optical telecommunications, has officially joined the Telecom Infra Project (TIP), the global community that gathers some of the world's leading players in the telecommunications sector around a shared goal: moving beyond the closed, proprietary model that has shaped network infrastructure for decades.
For a company founded just months ago, this is far from a symbolic step. It means sitting at the same table as operators such as Vodafone, Orange, Deutsche Telekom, Telefónica, AT&T and BT, and vendors such as Nokia, Ciena, HPE, Ericsson and NVIDIA, bringing a specific technical contribution in a field, the digital twin of optical networks, where Italian scientific expertise has already left a significant mark.
The Telecom Infra Project
Founded in 2016 on the initiative of Meta (then Facebook) together with a group of operators and equipment manufacturers, the Telecom Infra Project stems from a simple observation: demand for connectivity is growing far faster than the industry's ability to build and upgrade the infrastructure needed to support it. The main cause is not technological but structural: an ecosystem historically fragmented into proprietary solutions, in which each supplier controls its own hardware and software stack, making any change slow and expensive.
TIP addresses the problem by promoting an open, disaggregated approach: separating hardware from software, defining open and standard interfaces, and enabling operators to build their networks by freely choosing the best components, without being locked into a single supplier. The work takes place in project groups and technical subgroups, where operators, vendors, system integrators, start-ups and universities collaborate on the development of specifications, open source software, reference architectures and testing and validation programmes on live networks. Today the community counts several hundred participating organisations worldwide.
Synphonya has joined in particular the Open Optical & Packet Transport (OOPT) group, dedicated to optical and packet transport technologies: the very core of the infrastructure carrying global Internet traffic. The founding team of the young innovative company, incubated in I3P since the beginning of 2026, brings together expertise in optical modelling, software platforms, fiber sensing and enterprise go-to-market.
The start-up’s technology
Synphonya develops an open digital twin for optical networks: a software platform that replicates the physical behaviour of the network and, through predictive models and artificial intelligence, makes it possible to simulate, anticipate and optimise the performance of the infrastructure before any intervention in the field. The goal is to drastically reduce the time and cost of planning and provisioning (still largely manual today) and to give operators full visibility into a layer, the physical optical one, that has historically remained opaque.
The connection with TIP, however, goes back a long way. The GNPy simulation framework, today an international reference for computing quality of transmission in open optical networks, was born and grew within TIP's working groups, with a decisive scientific contribution from Politecnico di Torino. Vittorio Curri, Co-Founder and Scientific Lead of Synphonya, is among the protagonists of that journey.
Formally joining TIP therefore means three very concrete advantages for Synphonya:
- Contributing to standards, not just adopting them. Taking part in the technical subgroups makes it possible to bring the company's expertise directly to where specifications are defined, helping to build the rules of the game rather than simply following them.
- Engaging with those who run networks every day. Access to the working groups opens a direct channel with international operators and vendors: a setting where real-world requirements emerge earlier, and where a solution can be validated in the field and not only in the laboratory.
- Strengthening a positioning built on openness. At a time when Europe is debating digital sovereignty, the resilience of critical infrastructure and compliance with new European directives with growing urgency, independence from vendor lock-in is no longer merely a matter of economic efficiency, but a strategic choice. TIP is today the leading international consortium in which this vision translates into concrete technology.
The future of the project
The figures help frame what is at stake. As of early 2026, more than 6 billion people are connected to the internet: 73.2% of the world's population, up 5.1% in a single year. Over the same period, global internet traffic grew by 19%, and mobile data traffic is expected to grow 2.2 times by 2031. This acceleration is no longer driven by end users alone, but also by data centres, cloud services and AI workloads, which require infrastructure to be interconnected with ever greater capacity and ever tighter response times.
The market that has to support this demand, optical transport networks, is worth $16 billion today and growing at 10% a year, driven precisely by data centre interconnection. Within it, open and disaggregated architectures are the fastest-moving segment: forecasts point to annual growth of 27% for IP-over-DWDM and 17% for disaggregated DWDM. The cost of the closed model, however, remains high: in multi-vendor optical networks, introducing a new component into an existing environment can take three to six months and increase testing costs by more than 50%. It is in this gap, between accelerating demand and infrastructure still largely managed through manual processes and with limited visibility into the physical layer, that Synphonya's proposition sits.
With its entry into TIP, the Synphonya team will begin actively participating in the technical subgroups of interest within OOPT, with the aim of contributing to the development of open specifications and consolidating industrial collaborations with operators and vendors in the community. This path runs alongside the start-up's other lines of development, including its participation in European research projects under the Horizon Europe programme.
"Joining the Telecom Infra Project allows us to build the product alongside the people who run these networks every day", said Rocco D'Ingillo, Co-Founder & CEO of Synphonya. "Our goal for 2026 is to validate our MVP with a pilot partner on live network data, and over the following two years to reach our first industrial Proof of Value projects and first enterprise contracts. Our ambition is for the optical network to stop being an opaque layer, managed through manual intervention, and to become an infrastructure that can be simulated and optimised before anyone intervenes in the field. All of this on open standards, because in the international technology landscape, and in the European one in particular, freedom of management and freedom to choose your supplier are no longer only a matter of cost, but also a matter of resilience."
