Telco edge compute, RAN and AI

In recent years, the telecommunications industry has witnessed a profound transformation, driven by the rapid penetration of cloud technologies. Cloud Native Functions have become common in the packet core, OSS BSS, transport and are making their way in the access domain, both fixed and mobile. CNFs mean virtual infrastructure management and data centers have become an important part of network capex strategies. 

While edge computing in telecoms, with the emergence of MEC (Multi Access Edge Computing), has been mostly confined to telco network functions (UPF, RAN CU/DU...) network operators should now explore the opportunities for retail and wholesale of edge computing services. My workshop examines in details the strategies, technologies and challenges associated with this opportunity.

Traditional centralized cloud infrastructure is being augmented with edge computing, effectively bringing computation and data storage closer to the point of data generation and consumption.

What are the benefits of edge computing for telecom networks?

• Low Latency: One of the key advantages of edge computing is its ability to minimize latency. This is of paramount importance in telecoms, especially in applications like autonomous vehicles, autonomous robots / manufacturing, and remote-controlled machinery.
• Bandwidth Efficiency: Edge computing reduces the need for transmitting massive volumes of data over long distances, which can strain network bandwidth. Instead, data processing and storage take place at the edge, significantly reducing the burden on core networks. This is particularly relevant for machine vision, video processing and AI use cases.
• Enhanced Security: Edge computing offers improved security by allowing sensitive data to be processed locally. This minimizes the exposure of critical information to potential threats in the cloud. Additionally, privacy, data sovereignty and residency concerns can be efficiently addressed by local storage / computing.
• Scalability: Edge computing enables telecom operators to scale resources as needed, making it easier to manage fluctuating workloads effectively.
• Simpler, cheaper devices: Edge computing allows devices to be cheaper and simpler while retaining sophisticated functionalities, as storage, processing can be offloaded to a nearby edge compute facility.

Current Trends in Edge Computing for Telecoms

The adoption of edge computing in telecoms is rapidly evolving, with several trends driving the industry forward:

• 5G and private networks Integration: The deployment of 5G networks is closely intertwined with edge computing. 5G's high data transfer rates and low latency requirements demand edge infrastructure to deliver on its promises effectively. The cloud RAN and service based architecture packet core functions drive demand in edge computing for the colocation of UPF and CU/DU functions, particularly for private networks.
• Network Slicing: Network operators are increasingly using network slicing to create virtualized network segments, allowing them to allocate resources and customize services for different applications and use cases.
• Ecosystem Partnerships: Telcos are forging partnerships with cloud providers, hardware manufacturers, and application developers to explore retail and wholesale edge compute services.

Future Prospects

The future of edge computing in telecoms offers several exciting possibilities:

• Edge-AI Synergy: As artificial intelligence becomes more pervasive, edge computing will play a pivotal role in real-time AI processing, enhancing applications such as facial recognition, autonomous drones, and predictive maintenance. Additionally, AI/ML is emerging as a key value proposition in a number of telco CNFs, particularly in the access domain, where RAN intelligence is key to optimize spectrum and energy usage, while tailoring user experience.
• Industry-Specific Edge Solutions: Different industries will customize edge computing solutions to cater to their unique requirements. This could result in the development of specialized edge solutions for healthcare, manufacturing, transportation, and more.
• Edge-as-a-Service: Telecom operators are likely to offer edge services as a part of their portfolio, allowing enterprises to deploy and manage edge resources with ease.
• Regulatory Challenges: As edge computing becomes more integral to telecoms, regulatory challenges may arise, particularly regarding data privacy, security, and jurisdictional concerns.

New revenues streams can also be captured with the deployment of edge computing.

• For consumers, it is likely that the lowest hanging fruit in the short term is in gaming. While hyperscalers and gaming companies have launched their own cloud gaming services, their success has been limited due to the poor online experience. The most successful game franchises are Massive Multiplayer Online. They pitch dozens of players against each other and require a very controlled latency between all players for a fair and enjoyable gameplay. Only operators can provide controlled latency if they deploy gaming servers at the edge. Without a full blown gaming service, providing game caching at the edge can drastically reduce the download time for games, updates and patches, which increases dramatically player's service satisfaction.
• For enterprise users, edge computing has dozens of use cases that can be implemented today that are proven to provide superior experience compared to the cloud. These services range from high performance cloud storage, to remote desktop, video surveillance and recognition.
• Beyond operators-owned services, the largest opportunity is certainly the enablement of edge as a service (EaaS), allowing cloud developers to use edge resources as specific cloud availability zones.

Edge computing is rapidly maturing in the telecom industry by enabling low-latency, high-performance, and secure services that meet the demands of new use cases. As we move forward, the integration of edge computing with 5G and the continuous development of innovative applications will shape the industry's future. Telecom operators that invest in edge computing infrastructure and capabilities will be well-positioned to capitalize on the opportunities presented by this transformative technology. 

Edge computing risks and opportunities for operators and hyperscalers

 Part of a presentation to the World Bank's investment teams regarding institutional investment in ICT for emerging countries.

Edge Computing risks and Opportunities for Telco and hyperscalers from Patrick Lopez

The business cases of edge computing

Edge computing has been a trendy topic over the last year. Between AWS' launch of Outpost, Microsoft continuous effort with Azure Stack, Nvidia's specialized gaming version EGX platform or even Google's Anthos toolkit, much has been said about this market segment.
Network operators, on their side, have announced plans for deployments in many geographies, but with little, in terms of specific new services, revenues or expected savings.
Having been in the middle of several of these discussions, between vendors, hyperscalers, operators and systems integrators, I am glad to share a few thoughts on the subject.

Hyperscalers have not been looking at edge computing as a new business line, but rather as an extension of their current cloud capabilities. There are many use cases today that cannot be fully satisfied by the cloud, due to a combination of high / variable latency, network congestion, and lack of visibility / control of the last mile connectivity.
For instance, anyone having tried to edit online a diagram in powerpoint office 365 or to play a massive multiplayer online cloud game will recognize how maddeningly frustrating the experience can be.
Edge computing, as in bringing cloud resources closer physically to where data is consumed / produced makes sense to reduce latency and the need for on-premise dedicated resources. From an hyperscaler's perspective, edge computing can be as simple as dropping a few racks within an operator data center to allow their clients to use and configure new availability zones with specific performance and price.

Network operators, who have largely lost the cloud computing wholesale market to the hyperscalers, see edge computing as an opportunity to reintegrate the value chain, by offering cloud-like services at incomparable performance. Ideally, they would like to capture and retain the emerging high performance cloud computing market that will be sure to spurn a new category of digital services ranging from AI-augmented manufacturing and automation, autonomous vehicles, ubiquitous facial and object recognition and compute-less smart devices. The problem is that a lot of these hypothetical services are ill-defined, far fetched and futuristic, which does not inspire sufficient confidence to the CFO that has to approve multi - billion capital expenditure to get going.

But surely, if the likes of Microsoft, Intel, HP, Google, Facebook, AWS are investing in Edge Computing there must be something there? What are the operators missing to make the edge computing business case positive?

Mobile or multi access edge computing?

Many operators looked at edge computing first from the perspective of mobile. The mobile edge computing business case remains extremely uncertain. There is no identified use case that justifies the cost to deploy thousands of mini compute capabilities at mobile site in the short term. Even with the perspective of upgrading networks to 5G, the added cost of mobile edge computing is hard to justify.

If not in mobile site, the best bet to deploy edge computing for network operators is in Central Offices (CO). These facilities house commuting platforms for copper, fiber, DSL connectivity and are overdue for upgrade in many markets. The deployment of fibre, the copper replacement and the evolution of technology from GPON to XGS-PON and PON2 are excellent windows of opportunity to replace aging single-purposes infrastructure with open, software defined computing capability.
The level of investment for central offices retooling into mini data centers is orders of magnitude lower than the mobile case, and is completely flexible. It is not necessary to change all central offices, one can proceed by deploying one per state / province / region and increase capillary as business dictates.

What use cases would make edge computing's business case positive for operators in that scenario?

• First, for operators who have triple and quadruple play, the opportunity to replace aging dedicated infrastructure for TV, fixed telephony, enterprise and residential connectivity by cloud native software defined open architecture provides interesting savings and benefits. The savings are realized from the separation of hardware and software, the sourcing and deployment of white boxes and the opex savings of separating control plane and centralizing and automating service elasticity. 
• Additional savings are to be had with the deployment at the edges of content / video caches. Particularly for TV providers who see the increase of on-demand and unicast live traffic, positioning edge caches allow up to 80% savings in content transport. This is likely to increase with the upgrade from HD to 4K, 8K and growth in AR/VR.
• At last, for operators who are deploying their CPE in their customers' home, edge computing allows to simplify and reduce drastically the cost of these equipments and their deployment / maintenance by bringing the services into the Central Office and reducing the need for storage and compute in the CPE.

While the savings can be significant in the long run, no operator can justify substituting existing infrastructure if its amortization is not fully realized on these premises alone. This is why some operators are looking at these scenarios only for greenfield fiber deployments or as part of massive copper replacement windows.
Savings alone in all likeliness won't allow operators to deploy at the rhythm necessary to counter hyperscalers. New revenues streams can also be captured with the deployment of edge computing.

• For consumers, it is likely that the lowest hanging fruit in the short term is in gaming. While hyperscalers and gaming companies have launched their own cloud gaming services, their success has been limited due to the poor online experience. The most successful game franchises are Massive Multiplayer Online. They pitch dozens of players against each other and require a very controlled latency between all players for a fair and enjoyable gameplay. Only operators can provide controlled latency if they deploy gaming servers at the edge. Without a full blown gaming service, providing game caching at the edge can drastically reduce the download time for games, updates and patches, which increases dramatically player's service satisfaction.
• For enterprise users, edge computing has dozens of use cases that can be implemented today that are proven to provide superior experience compared to the cloud. These services range from high performance cloud storage, to remote desktop, to video surveillance and recognition.
• Beyond operators-owned services, the largest opportunity is certainly the enablement of edge as a service (EaaS), allowing cloud developers to use edge resources as specific cloud availability zones.

The main issue at this stage, for operators is to decide whether to let hyperscalers deploy their infrastructure in their network, capturing most of the value of these emerging services but also opening up a new line of revenue from wholesale hosting or trying to play it alone, as an operator or a federation of them, deploying a telco cloud infrastructure and building the necessary platform to resell edge compute resource in their networks.

This and a lot more use cases and business cases in my online workshop and report Edge Computing 2020.

MEC 2016 Executive Summary

2016 sees a sea change in the fabric of the mobile value chain. Google is reporting that mobile search revenue now exceed desktop, whereas 47% of Facebook members are now exclusively on mobile, which generates 78% of the company’s revenue. It has taken time, but most OTT services that were initially geared towards the internet are rapidly transitioning towards mobile.

The impact is still to be felt across the value chain.

OTT providers have a fundamentally different view of services and value different things than mobile network operators. While mobile networks have been built on the premises of coverage, reliability and ubiquitous access to metered network-based services, OTT rely on free, freemium, ad-sponsored or subscription based services where fast access and speed are paramount. Increase in latency impacts page load, search time and can cost OTTs billions in revenue.

The reconciliation of these views and the emergence of a new coherent business model will be painful but necessary and will lead to new network architectures.

Traditional mobile networks were originally designed to deliver content and services that were hosted on the network itself. The first mobile data applications (WAP, multimedia messaging…) were deployed in the core network, as a means to be both as close as possible to the user but also centralized to avoid replication and synchronization issues.

3G and 4G Networks still bear the design associated with this antiquated distribution model. As technology and user behaviours have evolved, a large majority of content and services accessed on cellular networks today originate outside the mobile network. Although content is now stored and accessed from clouds, caches CDNs and the internet, a mobile user still has to go through the internet, the core network, the backhaul and the radio network to get to it. Each of these steps sees a substantial decrease in throughput capacity, from 100's of Gbps down to Mbps or less. Additionally, each hop adds latency to the process. This is why networks continue to invest in increasing throughput and capacity. Streaming a large video or downloading a large file from a cloud or the internet is a little bit like trying to suck ice cream with a 3-foot bending straw.

Throughput and capacity seem to be certainly tremendously growing with the promises of 5G networks, but latency remains an issue. Reducing latency requires reducing distance between the consumer and where content and services are served. CDNs and commercial specialized caches (Google, Netflix…) have been helping reduce latency in fixed networks, by caching content as close as possible to where it is consumed with the propagation and synchronization of content across Points of Presence (PoPs). Mobile networks’ equivalent of PoPs are the eNodeB, RNC or cell aggregation points. These network elements, part of the Radio Access Network (RAN) are highly proprietary purpose-built platforms to route and manage mobile radio traffic. Topologically, they are the closest elements mobile users interact with when they are accessing mobile content. Positioning content and services there, right at the edge of the network would certainly substantially reduce latency.

For the first time, there is an opportunity for network operators to offer OTTs what they will value most: ultra-low latency, which will translate into a premium user experience and increased revenue. This will come at a cost, as physical and virtual real estate at the edge of the network will be scarce. Net neutrality will not work at the scale of an eNodeB, as commercial law will dictate the few applications and services providers that will be able to pre-position their content.

Mobile Edge Computing provides the ability to deploy commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) IT systems right at the edge of the cellular network, enabling ultra-low latency, geo-targeted delivery of innovative content and services. More importantly, MEC is designed to create a unique competitive advantage for network operators derived from their best assets, the network and the customers’ behaviour. This report reviews the opportunity and timeframe associated with the emergence of this nascent technology and its potential impact on mobile networks and the mobile value chain.