China Unicom, Deutsche Telekom, EE, KDDI, Orange, Singtel, SK Telecom, Telefonica and TIM have joined forces, with the support of the GSMA, to develop an interoperable platform to make edge compute capabilities widely and easily available.
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, GSMA says.
As always, several different business models are feasible, ranging from relatively simple common interfaces and management systems across carrier domains. Colocation is possible.
In other cases actual computing as a service, available from multiple carriers across the globe, might be available.
The platform will be deployed across multiple markets in Europe and progressively extended to other operators and geographies to achieve global reach, GSMA says.
Interoperability across multiple service provider domains is an important feature for many services aimed at enterprises. What is a bit unclear at the moment is whether the effort yields higher order or lower order interoperability.
At lower orders of interop enterprise customers might have assurances that their services work across domain boundaries. At higher levels perhaps the computing functions are standardized across domains.
Other entities are developing edge compute capabilities as well, including hyperscale computing giants, tower companies and others. Much may hinge on what features customers seek, and whether a relative handful of hyperscale platforms choose to colocate.
Some enterprises will want to rent compute cycles or storage, but run their own apps. Hosted services might work.
Others will want a local version of whichever hyperscale compute environment they already use. In such cases, the edge computing must include the relevant hyperscale platform. The same holds for enterprises that are using more than one compute platform at the edge, or a mix of hyperscale platforms across the enterprise.
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