Telefónica Signs An Agreement With KT Corp., China Unicom And Telstra

Posted by Telefónica

Telefónica has reached an agreement with the operators KT, China Unicom and Telstra to collaborate on the Muti-Operator Multiaccess Edge Computing (MEC) Experience. This agreement is part of the GSMA Operator Platform initiative, that aims at designing a solution for operators to expose and monetize its network capabilities, being focused initially on Edge Computing and covering services like IPComms and Network Slicing at a later stage.

This joint collaboration is focused on testing Edge Computing functionality and interconnection capability and verifying the ease and simplicity of a MEC platform for application developers to leverage. The objective is to obtain feedback from both Operators and developer communities to identify gaps and needs, share them with the GSMA Operator Platform and contribute to Standard Organizations and open source communities responsible for developing the different MEC components.

This initiative consists of four phases:

• The first one is focused in the development of basic Edge Computing capabilities such as interconnection of MEC platforms, smart edge discovery and smart resource allocation, to optimize the provisioning and delivery of edge services over a global footprint;
• The second phase is enabling mobility features, evaluating a use case in which end customers move from one geographical point to another;
• The third phase is focused in the service availability to roamers, to enable the use of edge when customers moves from their home network and visit a different network; and
• The fourth phase is focused on federation capabilities.

All this will facilitate edge application developers to deploy its solutions in this global footprint through a single and simple interface, without the need to develop custom integrations for each and every market. This will allow Operators to create a competitive global Edge Cloud, enabling Service Providers to develop, deploy and manage edge applications seamlessly over a global Edge Cloud footprint provided by Operators.

This joint work is based on the Operator Platform paradigm described in a document that has been recently published by the GSMA: Operator Platform Concept Phase I: Edge Cloud Computing.

In collaboration with the GSMA Operator Platform initiative, Telefónica, KT, China Unicom and Telstra have in this phase worked with Altran, to demonstrate a federation between various operator’s edge computing platforms so that they can enable its customers to deploy applications and workloads across each operator network and provide access to a global footprint.

The global MEC platform is used to show key features like:

• Select, deploy, and monitor applications across a federation of interconnected operators.
• Onboard new operators to the federated platform.
• Request edge node selection from the end user application to connect to the optimum serving edge node.

Edge Computing value proposition

Users and enterprises’ growing demand for privacy, security and enhanced performance for their digital applications drive the design of Edge. It is a platform that delivers computing, storage and connectivity capabilities to Enterprises and Software developers willing to place their solutions and applications in data centers within a telco network, close to the customer devices. These data centers can vary in size, location and capacity and can be deployed within mobile, fixed and/or enterprise networks. Deploying applications in those locations enables real time processing, guaranteed bandwidth, and increased privacy and security.

This reduces latency, diminishes devices’ computational needs, and lower ineffective use of communication capacity. It plays an important part in delivering some of the promises of ultra-low latency and ultra-high reliability in 5G standards. MEC combines the benefits of both, cloud solutions’ affordability and scalability, and on-premise solutions’ performance and convenience.

―CT Bureau