Telefónica recently announced that it has reached an agreement with KT, China Unicom and Telstra to collaborate on the Muti-Operator Multiaccess Edge Computing (MEC) Experience.
This agreement is part of the GSMA Operator Platform initiative, that aims at designing a solution for operators to expose and monetize its network capabilities, being focused initially on Edge Computing and covering services like IPComms and Network Slicing at a later stage.
This joint collaboration is focused on testing Edge Computing functionality and interconnection capability and verifying the ease and simplicity of a MEC platform for application developers to leverage. The objective is to obtain feedback from both Operators and developer communities to identify gaps and needs, share them with the GSMA Operator Platform and contribute to Standard Organizations and open source communities responsible for developing the different MEC components.
This initiative consists of four phases with the first one focusing in the development of basic Edge Computing capabilities such as interconnection of MEC platforms, smart edge discovery and smart resource allocation, to optimize the provisioning and delivery of edge services over a global footprint.
In collaboration with the GSMA Operator Platform initiative, Telefónica, KT, China Unicom and Telstra have in this phase worked with Altran, to demonstrate a federation between various operator’s edge computing platforms so that they can enable its customers to deploy applications and workloads across each operator network and provide access to a global footprint.
Juan Carlos Garcia, SVP Technology and Ecosystem, Telefonica
Together with these Tier1 operators, we are making available to the industry the means to build and deliver a global telco-based Edge Cloud service, providing the necessary mechanisms that complement current MEC standards to enable the federation of operator’s edge computing platforms.
Hakan Eriksson, Group CTO and Technology Executive, Telstra
Telstra is a strong believer in a Multi Operator Edge environment that makes applications globally accessible and portable, offering the scale needed for a faster and wider adoption of a telco-based Edge Cloud Service.
