Mobile data and device volumes have been growing rapidly in recent years. That alone should be cause for celebration in the telecoms sector. But things are heating up even more now that Multi-Access Edge Compute (MEC) and 5G are coming of age. The growth opportunities are huge. But we’ve seen this before with cloud computing. After all, it wasn’t the network thailand phone number library operators that captured the market, but an online bookstore (Amazon), a software maker (Microsoft), and a digital advertising firm (Google).
To make a difference this time, trust is vital. Communications service providers (CSPs) will need to provide customers with assurances about the security and performance of networks and applications. They will also need to trust each other more by standardizing their tools and approaches.
This is already happening
MEC and 5G are not a distant future. The technology’s adoption is already picking up speed. Gartner claims that by 2022, more than half of the data generated by enterprises will be created and processed at the network edge. Meanwhile, the GSMA predicts that operators will spend more than $1 trillion on their networks by 2025, 80% of which will go to 5G projects. According to Nvidia boss Jensen Huang, “We’re about to enter a phase where we’re going to create an internet that’s thousands of times bigger than the internet we have today.”
The intelligent edge will be at the center of this new Internet. The use cases are virtually limitless. They range from streaming 3D Ultra HD video, virtual reality movies and 8K video to real-time communication via video calls and holograms, VR gaming and augmented reality.
It's time to take a step forward
On paper, carriers could help drive this new wave of innovation. Edge data centers need to be located close to devices, giving carriers and their cell sites an advantage over major cloud providers, whose centralized facilities can be many hundreds of miles away. But server location isn’t the only consideration here, and the jury is still out on who will provide what: carriers, cloud providers, enterprises, and even industrial solution providers
