Are CSPs ready for life on the edge?

The market for edge computing is in flux, with uncertainty hanging over everything from how enterprises and consumers will use the capabilities to who will play the lead roles in service provisioning. Communications service providers’ (CSPs’) success will depend on several factors including their ability to foster an application development ecosystem. Executives from Verizon, Orange, BT and Colt discussed the challenges and opportunities in a recent two-day TelecomTV event.

“Edge is…crucially important because it allows us to go beyond the infrastructure” to offer solutions that leverage networks, including 5G and fiber, according to Neil McRae, Managing Director Architecture & Technology Strategy and BT Chief Architect, BT.

However, despite CSPs’ confidence in the opportunities that edge services offer, a sense of caution also prevails.

“Are we going to lose the telco edge opportunity? There is some background in the telco industry,” said Javier Benitez, Senior Network Architect, Strategy & Innovation at Colt Technology Services, speaking during TelecomTV’s The justification for telco edge computing. “We tried in the past to offer cloud IT services and we have to admit it was really not very successful and maybe we were not ready and could not compete with the big cloud providers.”

Learning from cloud providers

Certainly, public cloud providers are investing heavily in their platforms, with a significant slice of their investment expected to be dedicated to edge computing, according to a recent TM Forum report. The hyperscalers see edge computing as an extension of their public cloud business that places computing closer to the point of consumption and enables new services such as IoT and AI. While CSP revenue continues to stagnate, notes the report, revenue from cloud infrastructure services is growing by 25% to 50% per year.

Benitez believes this time could be different, provided CSPs are prepared.

“What we have on the table now is a different set of services. We need to deliver specialized types of services in the cloud, which are network focused and that use the network as the key value proposition to the customer.”

However, Javier says it will require CSPs to deploy new technologies such as virtualization and containers, which in turn will demand considerable transformation.

“We [in the industry] are not going to be successful unless we can be agile and can develop and offer services in similar ways to the public cloud.”

Verizon, which operates a mobile network, already perceives demand for edge services in the fields of IoT, healthcare, logistics, fleet management, as well as private multi-access edge computing [MEC].

“We have public 5G and private 5G and obviously significant investments in MEC. We also have a lot of investment in telematics,” said Beth Cohen, SDN Product Strategies, Verizon, speaking on the same panel as Benitez.

Can application developers please step forward?

One of the challenges CSPs face is the need for a new generation of developers to work on creating attractive and innovative network edge applications.

“The real gap right now is there are no network-aware applications, and that’s where the developers are not quite at the table yet,” said Cohen. “Most of them are aligned to hyperscalers and think about development tools and don’t tend to think about networks. And as you move these applications out to the edge…you really do need to think about the network. It’s not enough to run it in a hyperscaler data center.”

BT’s McRae also sees a disconnect between the telco and application development communities.

“We don’t know enough about what application builders are doing, and they don’t know enough about what we can give them on the network,” said McRae, speaking during the TelecomTV webinar Partnership scenarios for edge hosting for 5G.

Yet although application developers will play an important role in driving innovation within the nascent edge computing market, some CSPs believe telcos still hold a very strong card: They argue their understanding of networks far outstrips that of the hyperscalers and that this will be an advantage when navigating the many complexities of delivering network edge solutions.

“Yes, telcos need to learn about applications, but [distributed and edge] networks in my opinion is the harder part to solve,” said Cohen. “If telcos take advantage of this opportunity – and now is the time to take advantage of it – telcos can have the technology edge.”