It often is difficult to estimate the financial impact of multi-access or telco cloud computing for a number of reasons. It is a new way of supporting core network operations; it is a retail service for customers; it can be a telco-owned or partnership business model, of limited or significant revenue upside opportunity; it might be a wholesale or retail model; public or private.
Further complicating matters, multi-access edge computing includes infrastructure as well as computing as a service segments; access services; system integration; private networks; hosting (real estate); platform and application segments that might involve telcos to a greater or lesser degree.
Further complicating matters is the fact that much edge computing will be part of broader public or private cloud sales, where edge services are a component of the overall computing as a service offer.
We are early in the development of edge computing, so it would not be surprising if edge represented one percent or less of total cloud computing service revenues, assuming $4 billion in MEC revenue and $406 billion in total cloud computing services. The issue is how that balance changes as MEC matures.
A reasonable estimate might be that MEC reaches a high of 10 percent of total cloud computing as a service revenues within five to 10 years. That might seem conservative, but many forecasters say MEC revenues are disproportionately earned by infrastructure (hardware, platform and software) suppliers rather than retail “edge computing as a service” suppliers.
Opportunity arguably is larger where there is limited hyperscaler competition; far more limited where hyperscalers are the logical providers of the actual edge computing and cloud computing services.
The point is that MEC revenue upside for telcos might be far more limited than many believe. By most estimates, most of the revenue will be earned by infrastructure suppliers; system integration suppliers and the hyperscale computing as-a-service giants.
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