Telecoms vendors must restrategise as Microsoft and AWS team up with operators on public edge computing

The strong enterprise demand for public edge computing is pushing operators to partner with public cloud providers

AWS’s December 2019 announcement of its Wavelength compute and storage service that can be co-located with operator 5G networks was accompanied by a list of operators that had already signed up for the service (KDDI, SK Telecom, Verizon and Vodafone). Only two weeks beforehand, AT&T and Microsoft had revealed details of their network edge compute (NEC) collaboration, in which Azure instances will be co-located in AT&T metro data centre locations, starting in Dallas. Verizon’s first network edge location is in Chicago and both it and AT&T are initially serving gaming use cases. Bethesda Softworks is an early Verizon customer, together with the National Football League; AT&T’s edge deployment initially supports Microsoft’s GameStack developer portfolio, and promises a 40–50% improvement in network performance compared with public cloud hosting.