Vodafone Business has announced plans to roll out multi-access edge computing on its 5G network, in cooperation with Amazon Web Services. The low-latency service will start in London next spring and roll out then to other UK and German cities.
Vodafone said it is the first company in Europe to enable organisations to create pilot applications using distributed MEC with Amazon Web Services (AWS). The companies first agreed in 2019 to develop the services, and Vodafone has been piloting the offer at two beta sites in the UK. The service is made possible by embedding AWS Wavelength at the edge of its 4G and 5G networks, bringing customers and key applications closer together.
The commercial MEC centre in London will provide an ultra-low latency zone over a wide area. The low latency zone will extend to Cambridge, Oxford, Birmingham, Bristol, and Cardiff, as well as many towns home to tech firms along the M4 motorway corridor and parts of Wales and Cornwall.
The mobile operator said trials had achieved latency of less than 10 milliseconds, compared to typical mobile data response times of 50 to 200 milliseconds. The new low was the total round trip time from the base station to the location where the MEC application server is hosted, going between a test location near its headquarters in Newbury in the south of England and Birmingham in the Midlands.
The operator plans to open an additional beta trial location in Duesseldorf, Germany early next year, with general availability in Dortmund later in 2021. This first AWS Wavelength Zone in Germany will cover the economic heart of Germany, including Duesseldorf and Cologne. In addition to London, these locations will also be used to support innovation hubs for business customers and software vendors.
Companies such as Dedrone, Digital Barriers, Groopview and Unleash live have already built and successfully tested applications deployed in Vodafone’s test facilities. Here Technologies will start trials in Germany in early 2021. The applications include an airspace security service, video analytics using body-worn cameras for frontline workers, a synchronised viewing experience with live video and chat, and real-time road hazard warnings.
Vodafone Business will run a MEC innovation programme in collaboration with AWS from early 2021 for a wider developer and business community to experiment with this new technology.
Every day we send out a free e-mail with the most important headlines of the last 24 hours.
Subscribe now
We welcome comments that add value to the discussion. We attempt to block comments that use offensive language or appear to be spam, and our editors frequently review the comments to ensure they are appropriate. If you see a comment that you believe is inappropriate to the discussion, you can bring it to our attention by using the report abuse links. As the comments are written and submitted by visitors of the Telecompaper website, they in no way represent the opinion of Telecompaper.