From Connectivity to Profitability: Telcos’ Guide to Monetizing New Services with Telco Edge Cloud

What is Telco Edge Cloud?

The Telco Edge Cloud is about to become the new and disruptive service from where a new generation of powerful use cases will be delivered to users.  From a physical standpoint, it is constituted by a distributed set of small to mid-size data centers, called “cloudlets,” that will be progressively deployed in many locations in every country, as close as needed to end users. This is because the Telco Edge Cloud enables the delivery of network-sensitive applications that require low-latency and high bandwidth, and thus cannot leverage the existing Cloud Computing infrastructure. These Edge applications will represent a breakthrough in the way operations are driven in many industries. 

Telco Operators are central players in this new business as they own and manage the network that is critical to enable the Edge use cases. Eventually, users will enjoy these applications-as-a-service in the same way they access applications in the Cloud, but latency or bandwidth requirements must be ensured anytime. This key role offers to Telcos the possibility to open a relevant new source of revenues and strengthen customer loyalty. 

Technical Challenges 

Two main technical challenges need to be solved to develop this high-potential business: 

R The scalability challenge: seamlessly managing up to thousands of instances of the same application that will be running in cloudlets globally, as easily as managing one single instance in the Cloud, with similar OPEX. 

R The roaming challenge: enabling a federation amongst the national TEC infrastructures to offer a global service meeting the demand of transnational business. 

To overcome both challenges, orchestration and automation are the key elements that will ensure that daily operations are not only available but secured and streamlined. Telco Edge orchestration, in this sense, needs to include a whole new set of features when compared to cloud computing or classical telco network orchestrators. Nearby Computing specifically aimed at these differential features when defining and developing its orchestration and automation platform NearbyOne. 

The Benefits of Telco Edge Cloud

The Telco Edge Cloud drives a long list of impactful benefits: 

1. 1. Telcos can propose powerful Edge apps as-a-Service to their customers or even PaaS and IaaS to allow their customers to host and manage apps in VMs inside the Telco Edge Cloud infra. 
   2. Each Telco customer gets a self-service marketplace to directly deploy and manage apps into their VMs or those available as a Service proposed by the Telco. 
   3. The architecture enables full Hybrid Public-Private Cloud capability. 
   4. The Telco Edge Cloud platform is based on an integrated container and VM converged platform, allowing for a larger number of potential customers. 
   5. TEC provides a cost-effective solution for businesses to host and manage cloud applications: insignificant latency and ultra-high bandwidth will lead to a differential customer experience and facilitate the adoption of TEC services. 
   6. The Edge Cloud infrastructure can provide greater security and privacy for applications that require sensitive data processing. 
   7. TEC can enable the deployment of applications in areas with limited internet connectivity, expanding the reach of businesses and services. 

Final Applications

As mentioned, the Telco Edge Cloud is the optimal platform to access a wide range of disruptive applications at a fair cost and in simplified conditions. These use cases include, amongst many others: 

R Mission-Critical communications 

R Remote Assistance (through Augmented Reality) 

R Many flavours of video analytics suitable for retail, manufacturing, logistics… 

R Virtual Reality, for instance for educational or industrial purposes. 

R Digital Twins 

R Smart Cities (traffic control, safety…) 

Overall, the Telco Edge Cloud is a new offer that is opening new and exciting possibilities for businesses and individuals, that will power the next stage of the digital transformation of our economies.