Edge Technologies Seen as Key Part of 5G, Necessary for 'Massive IoT'
Edge computing is one of the hottest concepts in wireless, but what the edge will look like and even where it’s located is evolving, speakers said Friday during a Mobile World Live webinar. Speakers predicted edge will be a key feature of 5G.
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Edge is “an emerging definition,” said Muneyb Minhazuddin, chief marketing officer of Intel’s Network and Edge Group. “Where we are with edge and edge compute and everything we’re talking about is maybe like 15 years ago where we were with cloud -- there’s no clear definition,” he said.
Carriers have almost 100% coverage of the last mile between the network and the customer, Minhazuddin said. “You start building compute network storage outside of your cloud and data center, towards the edge, where do you place it?” he asked. Is it at the cell tower or customer premise or part of the IoT? he asked.
Peter Jarich, head of GSMA Intelligence, agreed there’s still no single definition. “Early visions of edge had a server at every base station,” he said. “Maybe edge is actually in the device or the smart speaker,” he said: “You hear a lot of people talk about where the edge is.”
“I don’t know that there will ever be an actual definition,” said Jillian Kaplan, Dell Technologies head-telecom thought leadership. “Applications evolve and use cases evolve,” she said: “It’s really about what’s best for that use and where the data is processed … what works for where this data needs to be. That’s really the benefit you get from edge computing, when you have massive amounts of data that need to be processed in real time.”
Geoff Hollingworth, Rakuten Symphony chief marketing officer, asked whether customers should care where their data is processed. “If it’s not location specific, it’s a cloud workload -- it can work anywhere,” he said. “For many applications, that’s very good,” he said. Edge computing will likely roll out much as wireless service has, he said: “It’s going to be a demand and densification roll out over the next five to 10 years.”
The emphasis should be on meeting customer needs, Hollingworth said. Amazon Web Services doesn’t identify itself as a cloud provider -- that identity comes from everyone else, he said. AWS has been successful because it has “completely focused on solving customer and user problems,” he said.
Experts agreed it’s time for providers to deploy edge technologies and monetize deployments. “We’ve been in the testing phase for a couple of years now,” Minhazuddin said. “I think we need to start deploying,” Kaplan said.
Hollingworth finds it “frightening” that more than half of carriers are still testing edge. “Labs in telecom are where good ideas go to die,” he said. The opportunity for telecom from the edge “is very large, but the only way to capture it is by actually trying to do it and then facing the fact that it’s very hard,” he said.
Telecom carriers see 5G as required to “drive edge implementation at scale,” said Pablo Iacopino, head-research and commercial content at GSMA Intelligence. There's a natural connection between edge computing and 5G, Iacopino said. “Massive IoT drives the need for edge computing,” he said: “Edge computing, high-value use cases, need 5G capabilities, and in turn 5G allows massive IoT connectivity.”
GSMA recently surveyed 2,900 business consumers about the importance of edge to IoT deployments, Iacopino said. About half said edge computing is critical, and that's true across sectors, he said. Edge computing is also important to business-to-consumer communications, allowing cloud gaming, immersive reality, e-sports and connected cars, he said. Carriers also see challenges to implementing an edge solution, with 25% seeing their own lack of employee expertise as a top concern, he said.
Meanwhile, Verizon started to move traffic onto its cloud-native, software-defined 5G core, in a move aimed at adding network capacity. “The advanced capabilities, high speed, increased bandwidth, and low latency of 5G is inspiring development of a wide variety of new use cases that include everything from massive numbers of IoT devices that use very few network resources, to smartphones with nearly infinite opportunities to use data, to more complex solutions such as [augmented and virtual reality] and mixed reality that will require massive computing capabilities and low latency on the edge of the network,” Verizon said Thursday.