Living on the Edge

Episode 21: California Love: Superbowl LVI and the Fan Experience

Inside LIving on the Edge episode 21, Jason and Dan profile the use of immersive experiences at Superbowl LVI. From NFL’s partnership with Snapchat, Kia’s Robodog AR app, Coinbase QR code and the LA’s Coliseum tribute, augmented reality and contactless retail lead marketing strategies towards fan and consumer experience.Links:NFL opens Snapchat playbook for Super Bowl Sunday — NFL and Snapchat are looking to boost engagement during an event that is not only the biggest TV show of the year but also one that is increasingly tied to mobile devices. When it comes to sports, 87% of Snapchat users favor the photo messaging app over other apps, per Snap data shared with Marketing Dive, making it a key channel as the NFL and brands seek to reach second-screening consumers during the big game. The NFL's activations touch every part of the Snapchat experience, with shows on Discover, Cameo stickers on a Super Bowl-themed Cameo story and top plays on Spotlight, the app's platform for user-generated content. The league is using Snap's technology to boost its own mobile offering, unlocking Snapchat AR experiences in the NFL One Pass app that allow users to see a virtual Lombardi Trophy, wear a team jersey or be featured in a Hollywood-themed Super Bowl movie poster. U.S. Snapchat users played with Sponsored AR Lenses over 200 million times during last year's championship game, per statistics shared by Snap, an insight that could be driving brand activations this year powered by connected Lenses, Camera Kit integrations, Marker tech, machine learning and more. Verizon partnered with Snapchat for a 5G Connected Lens that lets game attendees join an AR experience where they team up and battle other groups to take control of a giant virtual airship hovering above the field. To promote its Flamin' Hot Doritos and Cheetos products — which will come together in a gameday ad — Frito-Lay has sponsored the first-of-its-kind Snackable Screens lens that allows users to point their camera at Doritos or Cheetos snacks to reveal the dance video for ad star Megan Thee Stallion's new song "Flamin' Hottie." The video will only be available via the lens on Feb. 13 before heading to the brands' YouTube pages on Feb. 14.'They will be blown away': NFL's next step in 'future-proofing' audience begins with Super Bowl ad — “The danger of complacency is real,” Tim Ellis, the NFL’s chief marketing officer since August 2018, told USA TODAY Sports. “Since the day I stepped into the NFL, I have been ringing the bell of urgency. We cannot afford to be complacent. We have to grow our core audiences - younger fans, female fans and Latino fans. With a sense of urgency, we have to focus on that." Note: Prior to being the EVP of Marketing at the NFL, Tim Ellis was the EVP of Marketing for Activision.Super Bowl LVI pays tribute to big game’s past with AR — To pay tribute to the city’s status as the first city to host a Super Bowl (as in Super Bowl I) in 1967, a large “curtain” that appeared to be suspended from a circular track suspended from the roof of SoFi Stadium, was digitally inserted. The curtain was “printed” with photography of the interior of the historic Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, the host of both the 1967 and 1973 Super Bowls. The curtain then opened to reveal a 3D recreation of the historic columned peristyle of the Coliseum, complete with a digitally recreated flame shooting out from the torch in the center. The 3D model also included two virtual video boards on either side of the flame as well as a recreation of the 1967 era scoreboard. Kia Launches ‘Dogmented Reality’ App Ahead Of Super Bowl — When you launch the AR experience, an adorable robotic dog with a serious case of puppy dog eyes comes to life in your personal space. Like a real pet, this robotic pooch comes with its fair share of responsibilities. You’ll need to spend time with your mechanical best friend—giving it belly rubs, scratching between its ears, and playing catch—in order to keep them healthy and happy. Think of Robo Dog as an AR version of the popular Tamagatchi Pets. Because Robo Dog is powered through 8th Wall as an AR web experience, there’s no need to download an app. You simply open up the camera on your smartphone and point it towards a unique Kia Robo Dogmented Reality QR code to launch Robo Dog, much like how you would scan a QR code located on the table of a restaurant to open a menu on your phone. Coinbase’s bouncing QR code Super Bowl ad was so popular it crashed the app — The full 60-second ad almost entirely consisted of a colorful bouncing QR code, reminiscent of the iconic bouncing DVD logo meme. When scanned, the code brought viewers to Coinbase’s promotional website, offering a limited time promotion of $15 worth of free Bitcoin to new sign ups, along with a $3 million giveaway that customers can enter. The offer is a limited time one, with new customers having until February 15th to get the $15 promotion — something that may be an issue, as Coinbase’s app is currently down, presumably due to the massive influx of traffic from the clever ad. 5G Changed the Super Bowl Experience. The Future of Retail Could Be Next — Spectators at the Super Bowl were also able to compete against one another in an augmented reality game. During pauses in on-field action, they received push notifications inviting them to participate in a game called Ultra Toss. Fans could point their phone at the field and try to toss footballs into a virtual pickup truck that appeared on the field. The mobile game debuted last year, but the prevalence of 5G allowed the NFL to roll out new features within the app in time for the Super Bowl, including a moving target and an AR overlay that tracks the stats of each section in the stadium. Erwin adds that other in-stadium features, such as sports gambling and mobile food ordering, will also benefit from better, more reliable service. And the game experience is also changing for fans watching from their couches. During the Super Bowl, viewers both in the arena and at home were able to watch the halftime show from a variety of angles, all streamed in 4KAkamai To Acquire Linode to Provide Businesses with a Developer-friendly and Massively-distributed Platform to Build, Run and Secure Applications — “The opportunity to combine Linode’s developer-friendly cloud computing capabilities with Akamai’s market-leading edge platform and security services is transformational for Akamai,” said Dr. Tom Leighton, chief executive officer and co-founder, Akamai Technologies. “Akamai has been a pioneer in the edge computing business for over 20 years, and today we are excited to begin a new chapter in our evolution by creating a unique cloud platform to build, run and secure applications from the cloud to the edge. This is a big win for developers who will now be able to build applications on a platform that delivers unprecedented scale, reach, performance, reliability and security.​” Juniper Networks Collaborates with Vodafone and Parallel Wireless on Groundbreaking Open RAN Use Case Trial — Juniper Networks (NYSE: JNPR), a leader in secure, AI-driven networks, today announced that it is working with Vodafone and Parallel Wireless, a pioneer in Open RAN solutions, conducting a multivendor RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC) trial for tenant-aware admission control use cases. The trial, initially running in Vodafone’s test labs in Turkey and with plans to move into its test infrastructure, supports O-RAN interfaces and addresses the key business challenges faced by mobile operators around personalized user experience, viable revenue generation and reduction in both CAPEX and OPEX for 4G and 5G services. The trial is based on an open, software-driven architecture that leverages virtualization to deliver more programmable, automated granular-by-user traffic management. The initial focus is on delivering tenant-aware admission control capability, enabling operators to personalize services and provide superior user experiences. Real-time tracking and enforcement of radio resources across the RAN enables mission-critical users – for example, hospitals and schools – to receive prioritized mobile data services delivery. This capability is enabled by Juniper’s rApp/xApp cloud-based software tools that manage network functions in near real-time, along with Parallel Wireless cloud-native Open RAN functions. The trial’s design philosophy is focused on demonstrating the potential of enabling open, agile resource management and mobile data delivery in any software-driven RAN environment. This approach enables services and applications to be managed, optimized and mitigated automatically by the RAN, built on real-time data insights from its own performance.

Episode 20: Inside the Metaverse: ARM Deal, Microsoft, Activision and IDC’s Edge Predictions

Inside LIving on the Edge episode 20, Jason and Dan discuss ARM/NVIDIA deal, IDC’s new edge marketplace predictions, net cloud native migration challenges, and the blockbuster metaverse acquisition of Activision by Microsoft in an $68.7B all cash deal. Links:The Arm deal is dead, but Nvidia is not expected to slow downEdge computing set for growth – that is, when we can agree what it is — "As edge technology continues to expand in usage in a variety of workplace environments, we are seeing growing interest in expected concurrent workload growth in areas such as business intelligence and analytics, AI/ML-related workloads, and content workloads," IDC senior research analyst Max Pepper said in a statement announcing the report. However, he added that the rapid deployment of edge computing is significantly shaping workload evolution. Maybe the real lesson of edge computing is that an edge deployment will be intended to deliver a specific solution, and that this may demand specific hardware, software, and connectivity to meet those requirements, rather than just an off-the-shelf product. In this case, the real opportunities for edge computing could lie with the systems integrators, which have the relevant skills to pull together a solution from various component parts and provide services to support customers in operating it.New report highlights cloud-native migration challenges — In almost all cases, respondents ranked the challenges in that same order: first network, then OSS, BSS, and enterprise. The only challenges that were considered more severe in an area other than the network were "in-house development and integration skills" and "development and integration tooling," where the OSS space was recognized as a greater challenge than the network. This is not surprising given that most Tier 1 carriers have dozens of OSS solutions in operation. They do much of any integration work between systems internally and some OSS systems are stand-alone – dedicated to siloed services. Those who have already deployed cloud native also consider all of the challenges in the enterprise area to be greater than the survey base as a whole and all of the challenges in the BSS area to be less of a challenge. Their firsthand experience with implementing cloud native in the network area has opened their eyes to the challenges that await them in the enterprise space. However, they are more confident that they have the support needed, near term, for BSS tasks which include billing, revenue, and customer management.Microsoft to acquire Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion — Deal was all cash. Microsoft is acquiring Activision, the troubled publisher of Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, and Diablo. The deal will value Activision at $68.7 billion, far in excess of the $26 billion Microsoft paid to acquire LinkedIn in 2016. It’s Microsoft’s biggest push into gaming, and the company says it will be the “third-largest gaming company by revenue, behind Tencent and Sony” once the deal closes. Microsoft plans to add many of Activision’s games to Xbox Game Pass once the deal closes. With the acquisition of Activision, Microsoft will soon publish franchises like Warcraft, Diablo, Overwatch, Call of Duty, and Candy Crush. “Upon close, we will offer as many Activision Blizzard games as we can within Xbox Game Pass and PC Game Pass, both new titles and games from Activision Blizzard’s incredible catalog,” says Microsoft’s CEO of gaming Phil Spencer. Xbox Game Pass now has 25 million subscribers, as Microsoft continues to acquire studios to boost the subscription service. A metaverse-loving Microsoft brings a dystopia for telcos — BT, the UK's telecom incumbent, has been documenting growth while grumbling about the implications. At first, it downplayed concern. Before lockdowns arrived in March 2020, normal daytime usage on the network ran at about 5 Tbit/s, revealed Howard Watson, its chief technology officer, in a blog at the time. The great retreat indoors sent that figure up to about 7.5 Tbit/s. No problem, said BT. Its network was built to withstand as much as 17.5 Tbit/s. But the executive tone had changed dramatically by December 2021. Spikes in Internet traffic had reignited the debate about net neutrality, the principle that stops operators from charging Internet companies for usage. A traffic tsunami of 25.5 Tbit/s was recorded on December 1, threatening to overwhelm BT systems, as a mere six soccer fixtures were streamed online by Amazon. "Of course, we invest to ensure our networks can cope with this but as demand grows further this decade we can see potential problems coming down the line," wrote Marc Allera, the CEO of BT's consumer division, in the latest BT blog. Even in the US market, where regulation is still light touch and competition is limited, major telecom stocks have declined during the pandemic. AT&T's share price has fallen 27% since the start of 2020, and Verizon's is down a tenth. Currently worth almost $2.3 trillion, Microsoft has enjoyed a 78% gain over the same period. Without something as hard to imagine as a telco-dominated metaverse, those fortunes will probably continue to diverge.Los Angeles Rams, Immersiv.io Team Up on Lens for Snap’s Next-Generation Spectacles — Immersiv.io’s Julien Deis said in a statement, “As a sports AR company, we are thrilled to create a sports fan experience of the future, and what’s better for a fan than being able to play catch with your favorite player? Through Spectacles, our focus was to design a lifelike experience that brings fan immersion to the end zone. So, we used the hand tracking technology available in Lens Studio to let fans wear a glove and catch the ball from Matt Stafford. We’re excited to experiment with the L.A. Rams to bring an innovative fan experience to life through the power of augmented reality.”

Episode 19: An Edgy Conversation Not About The Edge

Inside LIving on the Edge episode 19, Jason and Dan discuss reality.Links:Google: Four ways CSPs can harness data, automation, and AI to create business value — According to a new study by Analysys Mason, telecommunications data volumes are growing worldwide at 20% CAGR, and network data traffic is expected to reach 13 zettabytes by 2025. To stay relevant as the industry evolves, communications service providers (CSPs) need to manage and monetize their data more effectively to: - Deliver new user experiences and B2B2X services, with the “X” being customers and entities in previously untapped industries, and unlock new revenue streams. - Transform operations by harnessing data, automation, and artificial intelligence (AI)/machine learning (ML) to drive new efficiencies, improved network performance, and decreased CAPEX/OPEX across the organization. Here are four key data management and analytics challenges CSPs face, and how cloud solutions can help. 1. Reimagining the user experience means CSPs need to solve for near-real-time data analytics challenges. 2. Driving CSP operational efficiencies requires streamlining fragmented and complex sets of tools. 3. Leveraging cloud and automation can help CSPs reduce cost and overhead as data volumes continue to rise.Google: Five do’s and don’ts CSPs should know about going cloud-native — Do: Leverage cloud-native approaches to simplify networks Don’t: Just take legacy operational processes with you to the cloud Do: Recognize that operators will continue to own and control their networks Do: Build scale and simplicity into your data platform to unlock a whole world of use cases Don’t: Fall into the habit of architecting separate infrastructure for virtualized and containerized workloadsEdge spending on track to hit $176 billion this year — In geographic terms, IDC said the US is expected to be the biggest spender at $76.5 billion this year. By comparison, Western Europe and China are expected to spend $30.6 billion and $20.8 billion respectively. As for use cases, these vary according to whether you are an enterprise or an edge services provider. IDC reckons the two biggest use cases for edge services providers in 2022 will be content delivery networks and virtual network functions. Combined, these two use cases are predicted to generate $26 billion of the $38 billion of expected service provider spending on edge this year. When it comes to enterprise use cases, the discrete and process manufacturing sectors are expected to spend a combined $33 billion on edge in 2022. Retail and professional services will spend more than $10 billion. “Edge computing continues to gain momentum as digital-first organisations seek to innovate outside of the data centre,” said Dave McCarthy, research vice president, cloud and edge infrastructure services, IDC. “The diverse needs of edge deployments have created a tremendous market opportunity for technology suppliers as they bring new solutions to market, increasingly through partnerships and alliances.” BT is one such company hoping to capitalise on the opportunity to help those so-called digital-first organisations. The telco has established a new division within its enterprise arm called ‘Division X’. It has been tasked with scaling up and commercialising BT’s 5G private networking, IoT and edge computing solutions.Oracle Sparks Cloud Contrasts in Telecom Market — “Oracle Cloud for Telcos redefines the market,” he claimed. “In addition to our public cloud regions, we offer entire cloud stacks — inclusive of hardware, scaling, refresh, patches, and upgrades — in an opex model.” The company also claims the cloud control plane resides with network operators in the public or private scenario, and all data and metadata stays within the carrier’s environment. “We expect a mix of deployments, depending on locality to a public cloud region, level of cloud adoption, as well as the customer’s compliance requirements,” Leung explained. “We believe that telco IT, OSS/BSS, and some network functions are the most likely to move to public cloud today.”BT appoints MD of advanced enterprise comms division, inks ABB contract — UK telco BT has appointed Marc Overton as managing director of its newly created Division X unit, a part of its enterprise business established to commercialise the development of unique customer solutions including components such as 5G private networks, internet of things (IoT) and edge computing. “Division X is set to be a key growth engine for BT’s enterprise business, moving it from a telco to a techco by expanding into adjacent services that go beyond traditional calls and lines,” said Overton. “I am really excited to be leading a unit that will act as an innovation hub for our enterprise customers. We will be focused on turning emerging tech like 5G, IoT, edge and AI [artificial intelligence] into solutions that we can scale, sell, and which will drive sustainable growth.”Former AT&T exec takes COO job at RingCentral — “I look forward to working with the team to build on RingCentral’s core strengths of trust, innovation and partnerships to continue our leadership position in the exciting $100B+ cloud communications opportunity." Katibeh said in a statement. The AT&T Office@Hand service is based on the RingCentral Office platform, allowing employees to work “virtually anywhere” and enhance their ability to connect with their customers. They expanded their collaboration in 2018. AT&T announced last year it was giving “plain-old-telephone-service” (POTS) a makeover with the help of RingCentral. After ruining Android messaging, Google says iMessage is too powerful — Even if Google could magically roll out RCS everywhere, it's a poor standard to build a messaging platform on because it is dependent on a carrier phone bill. It's anti-Internet and can't natively work on webpages, PCs, smartwatches, and tablets, because those things don't have SIM cards. The carriers designed RCS, so RCS puts your carrier bill at the center of your online identity, even when free identification methods like email exist and work on more devices. Google is just promoting carrier lock-in as a solution to Apple lock-in. Despite Google's complaining about iMessage, the company seems to have learned nothing from its years of messaging failure. Today, Google messaging is the worst and most fragmented it has ever been. As of press time, the company runs eight separate messaging platforms, none of which talk to each other: there is Google Messages/RCS, which is being promoted today, but there's also Google Chat/Hangouts, Google Voice, Google Photos Messages, Google Pay Messages, Google Maps Business Messages, Google Stadia Messages, and Google Assistant Messaging. Those last couple of apps aren't primarily messaging apps but have all ended up rolling their own siloed messaging platform because no dominant Google system exists for them to plug into.Aptiv Acquires Wind River for $4.3B — “All the CEOs, CIOs are realizing that the next wave is operational technology, but in order to do that I have to bring all the investments I’ve made from IT and then bring them into the OT world. Not build from scratch — bring cloud native to the OT world,” CEO Kevin Dallas told SDxCentral in an August 2021 interview. Wind River claims its software touches more than two billion edge devices across more than 1,700 customers globally, and said it generated about $400 million in revenue in 2021. Aptiv said it plans to use Wind River Studio to develop software-defined systems for the auto industry, and continue to invest and develop the platform for other industries it serves, including telecom.JOHNSON CONTROLS ACQUIRES FOGHORN, EXPANDING LEADERSHIP IN SMART AND AUTONOMOUS BUILDINGS — "Value is increasingly being created by applying intelligence at the edge-device level to create real-time, secure, actionable insights," said Johnson Controls CTO Vijay Sankaran. "By pervasively integrating Foghorn's world class Edge AI throughout our OpenBlue solution portfolio, we are accelerating the pace towards our vision of smart, autonomous buildings that continuously learn, adapt and automatically respond to the needs of the environment and people."

Episode 18: COVID, TELUS, FAA and Helium

Inside LIving on the Edge episode 18, Jason and Dan welcome in the New Year, and a new COVID variant, with personal insights on the impact of COVID, The Economist’s take on the telco industry, what’s up with 5G and airports in the US and Helium’s bold ambitions. Links:Will the cloud business eat the 5G telecoms industry? — Then there are the political and financial barriers. European governments fret that America’s spooks will have even more access to their country’s networks if these run in American clouds (Europe has none of its own and is understandably even warier of Chinese ones). Carriers, in Europe and elsewhere, fear losing business to the tech giants like Amazon, Google or Microsoft, which have already skimmed most of the value generated by 4g mobile technology. “If all this is not financially interesting for [telecoms firms], they will try something else,” says Michael Trabbia, chief technology officer of Orange, a French mobile operator. However this plays out, the telecoms business will look very different a few years from now. The contest for control of the telecoms cloud, and particularly its “edge” (tech speak for what remains of the base station) will only heat up. Whoever is in charge of these digital gates will have the fastest access to consumers and their data, the main currency in a world of new wireless services, from self-driving cars to virtual-reality metaverses. The cloud businesses have the technological edge for now, and will try to eat as much of wireless networks as possible. The operators have relationships with customers, know how to manage networks and own the radio spectrum. Eventually, cloud providers and network operators will probably come to some kind of agreement. In the new world of mobile telecoms, neither can do without the other. “No crystal ball, but clear indications” says Samer Geissah — The evolution towards a cloud centric approach for 5G solutions and connectivity solutions will continue to accelerate and that is the challenge for connectivity service providers like TELUS. The challenge is to ensure keeping our customers in focus thus whether it is in health domain, or on the agriculture side, we are working together with our partners to ensure that we have an end-to-end view on how we conserve our costumer, ensuring that the costumer demands are the right demands for us to deliver again those objectives and ensuring that we do so, in an agile manner because the cloud world is very different from the traditional telco connectivity world. We are taking those steps towards this direction to ensure end-to-end coordination and at the end, the customer gets a service from a dependable secure by design, privacy by design which are the anchor design principles for any telco service. The team worked very hard and we depended not just on our core expertise, architects and engineers, we also have the privilege to enable and empower graduate trainees from various universities across Canada and that really is a differentiator. We are focused on enabling a new generation of engineers through the various GTLP programs which are going to be the anchor providers to our customers. That’s the real differentiator for us in TELUS.Five do’s and don’ts CSPs should know about going cloud-native — ...Gartner predicts that by 2025, cloud-native platforms will serve as the foundation for more than 95% of new digital initiatives, which is up from less than 40% in 2021. “Getting the data governance right is a critical part,” said Dr. Thomas. “We have all these different use cases that we use the data to drive business insights and value. The underlying data for it is in a common database. So as we do each use case, we will bring in new data into our data ocean, but they’ll be standardized and normalized.” In addition to data consolidation and normalization, it is essential to set standards for data quality, ownership, lifecycle management, interoperability and exchange. With that established, you can really focus on delivering that business value with 5G, IoT, and even network optimization use cases, most of which are data and analytics driven. Improving the cloud for telcos: Updates of Microsoft’s acquisition of AT&T’s Network Cloud — One key aspect of this collaboration is our respective roles—Microsoft develops the carrier-grade hybrid cloud technology that supports the AT&T mobility core network workloads. AT&T continues to select and manage the network applications (VNFs and CNFs) and their configurations to deliver mobility services to AT&T customers. As such, we're taking the AT&T Network Cloud technology, building it into Microsoft's standard hybrid cloud product, and then delivering a carrier-grade hybrid cloud solution back to the market and AT&T itself, where it can run at AT&T on-premises or on Azure public cloud. Microsoft hybrid cloud technology supports the AT&T mobility core network workloads used to deliver 5G connectivity that supports consumer, enterprise, and the FirstNet responder community. In terms of security, it’s important to note that Microsoft does not access AT&T customer data—AT&T continues to hold access to that data, and Microsoft cannot see it.Helium aims to be 'largest cellular network' in US — There are plenty of caveats to Haleem's statement. First, Haleem appears to be using the number of an operator's transmission sites as a measurement of the "biggest" operator. That's likely because Helium expects to count up to 40,000 5G small cells by the end of 2022. That would be more than the 30,000 Verizon ended 2021 with. It would also be within spitting distance of the 110,000 total macro cell towers that T-Mobile operates as it merges its operations with Sprint's network. Already Helium counts more than 400,000 LoRa transmission sites – for low-powered, slow-speed Internet of things (IoT) services – around the globe.

Episode 17: Telstra, Telefonica and Telus Edge Strategies, Plus More Private 5G

Inside Living on the Edge episode 17, Jason and Dan discuss the wide ranging strategies that mobile network operators are taking from network deployment to hybrid cloud. More on Private 5G with the Economist and AWS. Links:Moving core to cloud for 'suckers,' tweets BT exec after AWS outage — But a European telco backlash against these sorts of deals has begun. "Hope the folks at AWS fix their big problem and re-light their big candle – in the meantime I re-refer you to this," tweeted Neil McRae, chief architect of the UK's BT. His other tweet, the one to which he was re-referring his followers, reads: "So still want to put your network core into the public cloud? #suckers." Scott Petty, the chief digital officer of Vodafone, has been similarly scathing. "Our view would be that's too risky and that you are almost outsourcing a core competency," he said at a recent press event when discussing the AT&T arrangement with Microsoft. "You need to be able to work effectively with all the key players and move workloads around." So determined is Vodafone to avoid Snap's fate that it has even started investing in its own software tools, allowing it to move IT workloads from one environment to another. Over the next few years, it plans to add another 7,000 software engineers to the 9,000 it currently employs. European stakeholders, meanwhile, are pushing ahead with Gaia-X, a vague plan to create sovereign data infrastructure for Europe. It has been championed by bigwigs such as Timotheus Höttges, the CEO of German telco incumbent Deutsche Telekom. "If we find partners here in Europe who are driving this Gaia-X or the open-source standard for cloud infrastructure, this might help us as well in the edge environment," he told analysts on a recent call.Morgan Stanley Telecoms CTO Symposium: Telefonica Strategy for Systems and Network Evolution — 5G and Edge computing as enablers for new services requiring low latency and locality • There are services that require 1 ms of latency and cloud platform (as we know it today) can not provide support to them. • Edge computing, which brings the cloud closer to the customer. There are applications "on-premise" that can be hosted in the edge cloud. Telco Edge Cloud • Considered a complement to hyperscaler edge that allows providing differential MNO features, and further distributed topology following network core sites to deploy app loads. • GSMA operator platform definition concluded as reference to guide telco edge implementations. • Integration between 5G core and the telco edge platform to enable such features and provide a key differentiation to traditional cloudTelstra Purple launches new hybrid cloud service — The new service aims to help customers navigate their public cloud platforms from Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure, alongside Telstra Private Cloud, which has been built on Dell Technologies and VMware software to host customer data onshore. Available as a self-serve solution, Telstra Hybrid Cloud can also be fully managed by the Telstra Purple team, who is responsible for updating, patching and 24x7 monitoring, while organisations maintain control of their day-to-day virtual machine operations.Crown Castle, American Tower approach the edge differently — “As long as we own the really important pieces of network, fiber, small cell hubs, tower sites where we can put these edge data centers, we believe we are best positioned for that,” he continued. “And we don't see the need for those metro data centers to augment our offering.” It’s a different approach than tower company peer American Tower, which ramped up edge ambitions with a recent $10.1 billion deal to buy CoreSite. CoreSite’s portfolio adds 25 data centers, 21 cloud on-ramps and over 32,000 interconnections in eight major U.S. markets – significantly building on American Tower’s existing three metro and six edge data centers. He sees CoreSite as a way to boost growth rates on tower sites and extend that trend down the line as networks transition from 4G to 5G. “We think there’s an opportunity to have a whole another revenue stream created at the tower site,” he continued. “And we think the reality of that happening for us is enhanced by having direct control over these 21 critical cloud-on ramps as well as these 32,000 interconnection facilities across eight key markets in the U.S.”IBM and Telus partner on 5G edge compute solutions — Under the partnership, IBM will bring its Cloud Satellite solutions to Telus’ 5G edge computing platform, improving customers’ access to advanced AI and data analytics capabilities. By pairing the two, the partnership will allow enterprises to automatically deploy and manage latency-sensitive workloads, reaping the benefits of 5G, all through a single dashboard. Targeting the hybrid cloud environment, IBM’s Cloud Satellite allows the operator to manage applications across public and private clouds anywhere. Telus’ 5G edge computing platform brings additional benefits including low latency, secure connections, and high data availability to customers across Canada.Economist Report: Private 5G — Executives view integration with legacy systems and infrastructure complexity as some of the key barriers for implementing private 5G networks. Outsourcing to a managed service provider is a preferred approach for implementing private 5G networks, while system integration services and post- deployment network management are highly sought after when engaging with suppliers.Private 5G networks are becoming a thing, and Amazon's AWS wants to have a say on it — That’s why this new AWS Private 5G offering is so intriguing. AWS started with its cloud heritage, built the software tools necessary to run telco-focused workloads, then pieced it all together with the one element it didn’t natively have—the antennas and hardware RAN components—to create a complete solution. To be clear, AWS is partnering with RAN hardware providers, not creating its own hardware, as part of its offering. The company has yet to reveal who those partner companies are though. This is the opposite of the traditional concept of the carriers leading with a wireless network offering and then getting the necessary partners on the computing side, which they have clearly started to do Intel, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Dell, HPE, Cisco and many others have all started efforts with carriers. This also reflects the speed cloud providers are able to create solutions and potentially cut out carrier partners entirely. In many ways, the pay-as-you-go model offered by Amazon is more compelling for something like a private 5G network than its computing model because of the large upfront capital costs that private networks typically require.Q&A: AWS is on the edge, and that’s where its customers want to be — Vellante: So, AWS’ edge strategy is essentially to bring the AWS cloud to where the customers are in instances where they either can’t move or won’t move their resources into the cloud, or there’s no connectivity? Elissaios: Right. I think that you’re pointing out a very important thing, which is the common factor across all of these offerings. It is the AWS cloud; it’s not a copycat of the cloud. It’s the same API. It’s the same services that you already know and use. So, the powerful thing here is that it’s the same compute that you know and love in the cloud. The same Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance types, the Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes, the Simple Storage Service (S3), or Relational Database Service (RDS) for your databases and Elastic MapReduce (EMR) clusters. You can use the same services and the compute is the same, all the way down from the hardware up to the service.