In addition to moving their own network and administrative workloadsprivate, public and hybrid cloud environments, operators are simultaneously partnering with hyperscalers to deploy mobile edge computing (MEC). The long goal here is to combine 5G and MEC to deliver latency-sensitive enterprise-facing services that can generate new service revenues. 

Speaking at the recent Telco Cloud & Edge Forum (available on demand here), Tantra Analyst Founder and Principal Prakash Sangam described MEC as “one of the important topics being discussed as part of 5G, and indeed, [it] holds a great promise in terms of revolutionizing a lot of applications and services and how they are managed, especially for the enterprise market. MEC is also something where hyperscalers and…operators have to collaborate very closely.” 

To understand how operators are approaching deployment and monetization of MEC, as well as forging relationships with the cloud computing giants, Sangam talked through the subject with CHris Melus, vice president of product development with the T-Mobile for Business  Advanced Wireless Solutions division. Earlier this year T-Mobile US announced a partnership with AWS around go-to-market for solutions combining private 5G networking with MEC. 

Melus described two flavors of MEC that T-Mobile US is focused on: “We think about it through the public offerings of the cloud— offers from our hyperscaling partners—as well as there’s still a very rich ecosystem around private cloud being built. So we believe in both of those. So different customers have different affinities for their hyperscaling partners. They have different affinities for whether they want their data to be in a private cloud that they run themselves or one that has access out to the public cloud…So we believe in supporting all of those things for the customer in a just-right way.”

In terms of architecture, Melus stressed that there isn’t “a one-size-fits-all approach to how we look at MEC and compute as a whole. We look at it specifically by customer, by the business outcomes we’re trying to solve, and oftentimes we’ll wind up in a multi-MEC environment for different workloads to meet their needs…Sometimes it makes sense to go do that in a private cloud environment. Other things where you want broad distribution of data, easy access from anywhere, and you’re not really interested in heavy workloads going in and out, public cloud is a great offering for that as well.” 

In terms of MEC-enabled services getting traction in the market, Melus called out automotive manufacturing examples involving production line automation, automation of shipping and logistics processes, and applications using computer vision and artificial intelligence—all things that “are really making a case for why you would want that compute on-site and why you want it to be accesses in a multi-access way.” 

Looking at the complementary relationship between MEC and private 5G, which also sits within the Advanced Wireless Solutions division, Melus described the two as going “together almost perfectly…In all the instances of customers that we’re working with on private networks, regardless of the flavor, whether it’s a hybrid network or has some public capabilities in it or is fully private and air gapped to their campus and where they’re using the solution, MEC is the perfect addition to that.” 

He continued: “They really go hand in hand, and it’s rare that we have a conversation where we’re not talking about both.”