We would like to share with you some of the Tessares highlights from 2020:

• Celebrated our 5th birthday
• Published in IEEE Communications Standards magazine
• Contributed to RFC 8684 – MPTCP v1.0
• Presented at IFIP 2020
• Contributed to RFC 8803 0-RTT TCP Convert Protocol
• Published a white paper “Opening the way for 5G Wi-Fi Convergence”
• Awarded €1.2 million EU funding for an app to combine 4G/5G and Wi-Fi
• Received an EU NGI Pointer grant to further our work on MPTCTP open source

Our own Benjamin Hesmans, Nicolas Keukeleire and Prof. Olivier Bonaventure wrote  “Increasing Broadband Reach with Hybrid Access Networks” for IEEE Communications Standards Magazine about the motivation for MPTCP development and the major architecture options it presents. You can read a summary of the article here

In April we wrote about MPTCP (the protocol at the heart of what we do) being up-versioned to 1.0 and published as RFC 8684. Several new developments were included to make MPTCP even more efficient, reliable and secure. You can read what we said about it here.

In June, our team member Nicolas Keukeleire presented to IFIP 2020. His talk was a really good overview of how multi-path transport works. If you missed his talk, we have a summary of it here.

0-RTT TCP Convert Protocol was published in July as RFC 8803 with one of our founders, Olivier Bonaventure, as the lead author. 0-RTT TCP Convert allows us to convert from TCP to MPTCP and back again allowing us to combine 5G with Wi-Fi without adding additional latency. Read our blog about it here.

In September, we updated our most popular White Paper ever, “MPTCP, Opening the way for 5G convergence” where we talked about the use of MPTCP ATSSS, effectively hybrid access for 5G and Wi-Fi. In the 18 months since it was originally published a lot has happened, 3GPP Rel. 16 has been published and ATSSS has been successfully tested in a live network with KT in Korea. Access the white paper from our white papers page.

In November we announced that we were going to be one of the first companies in Belgium to receive EU blended financing. Our technical proposal was to further develop our latest solution: the combination of Wi-Fi and 4G/5G networks for smartphones. This would allow operators to reduce the load on their mobile networks, and offer a much better service to users: higher speed, higher reliability with smoother transitions between networks.

After a rigorous selection process, our proposal was chosen by a jury of experts and we have been awarded €1.2 million.

You can read the article in French here.

And in English here.

Finally, in December we announced that we had received an NGI Pointer grant to further our work contributing to the MPTCP open source implementation. The NGI or Next Generation Internet initiative is a project of the Digital Single Market of the European Commission. More information on the programme is available here.