The panel started with a discussion of what the edge actually is – and where it is.
This varies from sector to sector and even from company to company on the panel. Retelit’s Head of Wholesale Diego Teot defined the edge as “bringing the content to where the consumption is happening”, be that an application or a physical location.
Ashutosh Pateriya, Senior Partner Solutions Architect at AWS, emphasised that the edge depends on the specific needs of customers, ranging from routers at the base of a telecom tower to data centres in particular locations.
The session’s moderator, Sue Rudd, pointed out the contrast between industries, noting that for mobile operators, "the edge is a lot further out than it is for telcos.", with the panel agreeing that this range of definitions underlines the importance of working out what the customer wants.
The panel then shifted focus to real-world use cases of edge deployments across the represented companies.
Pateriya shared AWS’s collaboration with Cardiff University Hospital, where AWS deployed Wavelength and an in-building 5G network to enable real-time, remote contributions to medical operation training.
He also highlighted Amazon’s Snowball Edge technology, which facilitated a warehouse safety project by processing large amounts of camera footage data locally.
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BT Wholesale’s Client Director Mark Toman told delegates about the recent launch of an AR/VR experience with Belfast City Council to tell the story of the city of Belfast, delivered over BT’s specially optimised 5G network.
By working with the company providing the AR/VR application and optimising the network, BT managed to use its edge capacity to reduce an 18-hop journey to 8 hops and shave 10ms from the network latency. “Applications are the biggest revenue driver for edge”, Toman noted.
Deutsche Telekom Global Carrier’s Head of Business Development and Innovation Federico Homberg shared the results of the carrier’s work on using edge services to help a supplier to car manufacturers work on collision avoidance, as well as another project on analysing video feed data closer to the point of collection to optimise automated checkouts.
Retelit’s Diego Teot, meanwhile, spoke about a different focus.
The carrier’s edge strategy focuses on providing hybrid cloud for its customers via regional data centres. In the Italian case, according to Teot, ‘the edge’ can be anywhere that is not the data hubs of Milan and Rome, and this side of the business is growing- he spoke of an increase in RFPs for high density compute in regional locations in Italy, which makes sense given the country’s distributed industrial base.
Finally, stc’s GM Wholesale Operations Management Walid Mohammed Alwabel shared his experience of the carrier’s edge work in two contrasting areas – providing on-premises edge services for enterprise customers, and implementing a smart meter project to improve collection of electrical consumption data in households.
What's next?
Looking ahead, the panelists agreed that collaboration between market participants is key to advancing edge services. They discussed the potential for edge services to function like roaming services, with edge payloads moving across networks seamlessly.
The need for partnerships between telecom companies and hyperscalers was also emphasised, as no single company currently possesses all the capabilities to deploy edge on its own.
As BT’s Mark Toman concluded, "If you can’t control customer experience, you can’t deploy anything."
Capacity Europe is now in its second day at the Intercontinental at the O2 in London – and you can follow what’s happening across Capacity.
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