China Unicom, Deutsche Telekom, EE, KDDI, Orange, Singtel, SK Telecom, Telefonica and TIM have joined forces, with the support of the GSMA, to develop a multi-access edge computing platform that is interoperable.
The platform, to be developed in 2020, will make local operator assets and capabilities, such as latency, compute and storage available to application developers and software vendors enabling them to fulfil the needs of enterprise clients.
There are other interoperability efforts also underway, including 3GPP efforts, in addition to work by ETSI.
In the end, standards are not a business model, but an enabler of business models. Some note that the edge is a possible business battleground, as many in the ecosystem hope to capitalize on the opportunity as providers of computing as a service, computing platform as a service or colocation.
Hyperscale cloud computing firms now are moving into the incipient business at the same time 5G suppliers hope to secure a position. But tower owners and some retailers might also expect they have a role as well.
In the past, connectivity providers have often failed to compete with cloud computing suppliers or with independent data center providers, either. Verizon and AT&T. for example, already seem to be taking different roles in an effort to monetize existing assets for edge computing.
Colocation and connections might be the role telcos eventually are forced to assume, their aspirations notwithstanding. Interoperability will be important for connectivity providers as they seek to serve global enterprises, allowing a single “throat to choke” offer for facilities scattered around the globe.
At least so far, though, such capabilities seem more advanced at the level of colocation and hosting than actual computing as a service, at least in part because the current standards mostly apply to the ways different telcos operate their networks to support edge computing.
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