It is well established that edge computing is opening up new use cases that are computing and data-intensive, latency-sensitive and that may also require data residency, security and resilience. As Edge becomes a commercial reality, with more players competing in the space, operators are looking to the power of community as one part of their strategy to stake a claim in the edge value chain.
The GSMA has helped telcos to tackle this challenge as a community-based approach by looking at ways to engage the application developers ecosystem. The GSMA Telco Edge Cloud (TEC) initiative was formed by 19 MNOs in March 2020 – and has since grown to 22. The aim of the initiative is to create a global interoperable telco edge architecture that when adopted by operators worldwide, will create a consistent platform for developers and others to access edge computing resources with a global footprint. To support the TEC initiative, the GSMA’s Operator Platform Group (OPG) is developing technical specifications that will deliver the required interoperability across MNOs.
The first TEC trial involving Telefonica and Deutsche Telekom working with MobiledgeX took place earlier this year. The trial connected two edge nodes (cloudlets) running in Spain and Germany, where a latency-sensitive AR game was implemented using MobiledgeX’s aggregation platform.
Check out this video to find out how the families of Juan Carlos Garcia (Telefonica) in Spain and Alexander Lautz (Deutsche Telekom) in Germany fared with this differentiated AR gaming experience.