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.

The future is cloudy: NFV 2020 part II

I have received some comments after my previous post arguing that maybe the future of SDN and NFV is not as far as I am predicting. As we are all basking in the pre Mobile World Congress excitement, inundated by announcements from vendors and operators alike trying to catch the limelight before the deafening week begins, I thought I would clarify some of my thoughts.

We have seen already this week some announcements of virtualization plans, products and even deployments.

One of the main problems with a revolutionary approach such SDN and/or NFV implementation is that it suggests a complete network overhaul to deliver its full benefits. In all likeliness, no network operator is able to operate fully these kind of changes in less than a 10 years' timescale, so what to do first?

The choice is difficult, since there are a few use cases that seem easy enough to roll out but deliver little short term benefits (vCPE, some routing and switching functions...) while the projects that should deliver the highest savings, the meaty ones, seem quite far from maturity (EPC, IMS, c-RAN...). Any investment on this front is going to be just that...an investment with little to no return in the short term.

The problem is particularly difficult to solve because most of the value associated with virtualization of mobile networks in the short term is supposedly ties to capex and opex savings. I have previously highlighted this trend and it is not abating, more like accelerating.

Islands of SDN or NFV implementations in a sea of legacy network elements is not going to generate much saving. It could arguably generate new revenue streams if these were used to launch new services, but today’s focus has been so far to emulate and translate physical function and networks into virtualized ones, with little effort in term of new service creation.

As a result, the business case to deploy SDN or NFV in a commercial network today is negative and likely to stay so for the next few years. I expect the momentum to continue, though, since it will have to work and to deliver the expected savings for network operators to stand a chance to stay in business.

The other side of this coin is the service offering.  While flexibility, time to market and capacity to launch new services are always quoted as some of the benefits of network virtualization, it seems that many operators have given up on innovation and service creation. The examples of new services are few and far between and I would hope that these would be the object of more focused efforts.

At last, it seems that maybe one of my previsions will be fulfilled shortly, a friend pointed out that this year's GSMA freebee for its member at the show will be... a selfie stick.

2014 review and 2015 predictions

Last year, around this time, I had made some predictions for 2014. Let's have a look at how I fared and I'll risk some opinions for 2015.
Before predictions, though, new year, new web site, check it out at coreanalysis.ca

Content providers, creators, aggregators:

"OTT video content providers are reaching a stage of maturity where content creation / acquisition was the key in the first phase, followed by subscriber acquisition. As they reach critical mass, the game will change and they will need to simultaneously maximize monetization options by segmenting their user base into new price plans and find a way to unlock value in the mobile market." 
On that front, content creation / acquisition still remains a key focus of large video OTT (See Netflix' launch of Marco Polo for $90m). Netflix has reported  $8.9B of content obligations as of September 2014. On the monetization, front, we have also seen signs of maturity, with YouTube experimenting on new premium channels and Netflix charging premium for 4K streaming. HBO has started to break out of its payTV shell and has signed deals to be delivered as online broadband only subscriptions, without cable/satellite.
Netflix has signed a variety of deals with european MSOs and broadband operators as they launched there in 2014.
While many OTT, particularly social networks and radio/ audio streaming have collaborated and signed deals with mobile network operators, we are seeing also a tendency to increasingly encrypt and obfuscate online services to avoid network operators meddling in content delivery.
Both trends will likely accelerate in 2015, with more deals being struck between OTT and network operators for subscription-based zero-rated data services. We will also see in mobile networks the proportion of encrypted data traffic raise from the low 10's to at least 30% of the overall traffic.

Wholesaler or Value provider?

The discussion about the place of the network operator and MSO in content and service delivery is still very much active. We have seen, late last year, the latest net neutrality sword rattling from network operators and OTT alike, with even politicians entering the fray and trying to influence the regulatory debates. This will likely not be setted in 2015. As a result, we will see both more cooperation and more competition, with integrated offering (OTT could go full MVNO soon) and encrypted, obfuscated traffic on the rise. We will probably also see the first lawsuits from OTT to carriers with respect to traffic mediation, optimization and management. This adversarial climate will delay further monetization plays relying on mobile advertisement. Only integrated offering between OTT and carriers will be able to avail from this revenue source.

Some operators will step away from the value provider strategy and will embrace wholesale models, trying to sign as many MVNO and OTT as possible, focusing on network excellence. These strategies will fail as the price per byte will decline inexorably, unable to sustain a business model where more capacity requires more investment for diminishing returns.

Some operators will seek to actively manage and mediate the traffic transiting through their networks and will implement HTTPS / SPDY proxy to decrypt and optimize encrypted traffic, wherever legislation is more supple.

Mobile Networks

CAPEX will be on the rise overall with heterogeneous networks and LTE roll-out taking the lion share of investments. 

LTE networks will show signs of weakness in term of peak traffic handling mainly due to video and audio streaming and some networks will accelerate LTE-A investments or aggressively curb traffic through data caps, throttles and onerous pricing strategies.

SDN will continue its progress as a back-office and lab technology in mobile networks but its incapacity to provide reliable, secure, scalable and manageable network capability will prevent it to make a strong commercial debut in wireless networks. 2018 is the likeliest time frame.

NFV will show strong progress and first commercial deployments in wireless networks, but in vertical, proprietary fashion, with legacy functions (DPI, EPC, IMS...) translated in a virtualized environment in a mono vendor approach. We will see also micro deployments in emerging markets where cost of ownership takes precedence over performance or reliability. APAC will also see some commercial deployments in large networks (Japan, Korea) in fairly proprietary implementations.

Orchestration and integration with SDN will be the key investments in the standardization community. The timeframe for mass market interoperable multi vendor commercial deployment is likely 2020.

To conclude this post, my last prediction is that someone will likely be bludgeoned to death with their own selfie stick, I'll put my money on Mobile World Congress 2015 as a likely venue, where I am sure countless companies will give them away, to the collective exasperation and eye-rolling of the Barcelona population.

That's all folks, see you soon at one of the 2015 shows.

Report from SDN / NFV shows part II

Today, I would like to address what, in my mind, is a fundamental issue with the expectations raised by SDN/NFV in mobile networks.
I was two weeks ago in Dallas, speaking at SDN NFV USA and the Telco Cloud forum.

While I was busy avoiding bodily fluids with everyone at the show, I got the chance to keynote a session (slides here) with Krish Prabhu, CTO of AT&T labs.

Krish explains that the main driver for the creation and implementation of Domain 2.0 is the fact that the company CAPEX while staggering at $20 billion per year is not likely to significantly increase, while traffic (used here as a proxy for costs) will increase at a minimum of 50% compounded annual growth rate for the foreseeable future.
Krish, then to lament:

"Google is making all the money, we are making all the investment, we have no choice but to squeeze our vendors and re architect the network."

Enter SDN / NFV.
Really? These are the only choices? I am a little troubled by the conclusions here. My understanding is that Google, Facebook, Netflix, in short the OTT providers have usually looked at creating services and value for their subscribers and then, when faced with unique success had to invent new technologies to meet their growth challenges.

Most of the rhetoric surrounding operators' reasons for exploring SDN NFV nowadays seem to be about cost reduction. It is extremely difficult to get an operator to articulate what type of new service they would launch if  their network was fully virtualized and software-defined today. You usually get the salad of existing network functions with the newly adorned "v". vBRAS, vFirewall, vDPI, vCPE, vEPC...
While I would expect these network functions to lend themselves to virtualization, they do not create new services or necessarily more value. A cheaper way to create, deploy, manage a firewall is not a new service.

The problem seems to be that our industry is again tremendously technology-driven, rather than customer-driven. Where are the marketers, the service managers who will invent, for instance, real-time voice translation services by virtualizing voice processing, translation functions in the phone and at the edge? There are hundred of new services to be invented, I am sure SDN NFV will help realize them. I bet Google is closer to enable this use case than most mobile network operators. That is a problem, because operators can still provide value if they innovate, but innovation must come first from services, not technology. We should focus on what first, how after.
End of the rant, more techno posts soon. If you like this, don't forget to buy the report.

LTE World Summit 2014

This year's 10th edition of the conference, seems to have found a new level of maturity. While VoLTE, RCS, IMS are still subjects of interest, we seem to be past the hype at last (see last year), with a more pragmatic outlook towards implementation and monetization. 

I was happy to see that most operators are now recognizing the importance of managing video experience for monetization. Du UAE's VP of Marketing, Vikram Chadha seems to get it:

"We are transitioning our pricing strategy from bundles and metering to services. We are introducing email, social media, enterprise packages and are looking at separating video from data as a LTE monetization strategy."

As a result, the keynotes were more prosaic than in the past editions, focusing on cost of spectrum acquisitions and regulatory pressure in the European Union preventing operators to mount any defensible position against the OTT assault on their networks. Much of the agenda of the show focused on pragmatic subjects such as roaming, pricing, policy management, heterogeneous networks and wifi/cellular handover. Nothing obviously earth shattering on these subjects, but steady progress, as the technologies transition from lab to commercial trials and deployment. 

As an example, there was a great presentation by Bouygues Telecom's EVP of Strategy Frederic Ruciak highlighting the company's strategy for the launch of LTE in France, A very competitive market, and how the company was able to achieve the number one spot in LTE market share, despite being the "challenger" number 3 in 2 and 3G.

The next buzzword on the hype cycle to point its head is NFV with many operator CTOs publicly hailing the new technology as the magic bullet that will allow them to "launch services in days or weeks rather than years". I am getting quite tired of hearing that rationalization as an excuse for the multimillion investments made in this space, especially when no one seems to know what these new services will be. Right now, the only arguable benefit is on capex cost containment and I have seen little evidence that it will pass this stage in the mid term. Like the teenage sex joke, no one seems to know what it is, but everybody claims to be doing it. 

There is still much to be resolved on this matter and that discussion will continue for some time. The interesting new positioning I heard at the show is appliance vendors referring to their offering as PNF (as in physical) in contrast and as enablers for VNF. Although it sounds like a marketing trick, it makes a lot of sense for vendors to illustrate how NFV inserts itself in a legacy network, leading inevitably to a hybrid network architecture. 

The consensus here seems to be that there are two prevailing strategies for introduction of virtualized network functions. 

1. The first one, "cap and grow" sees existing infrastructure equipments being capped beyond a certain capacity and little by little complemented by virtualized functions, allowing incremental traffic to find its way on the virtualized infrastructure. A variant might be "cap and burst" where a function subject to bursts traffic is dimensioned on physical assets to the mean peak traffic and all exceeding traffic is diverted to a virtualized function. 
2. The second seems to favour the creation of vertical virtualized networks for market or traffic segments that are greenfield. M2M and VoLTE being the most cited examples. 

Both strategies have advantages and flaws that I am exploring in my upcoming report on "NFV & virtualization in mobile networks 2014". Contact me for more information.