Inside LIving on the Edge episode 21, Jason and Dan profile the use of immersive experiences at Superbowl LVI. From NFL’s partnership with Snapchat, Kia’s Robodog AR app, Coinbase QR code and the LA’s Coliseum tribute, augmented reality and contactless retail lead marketing strategies towards fan and consumer experience.Links:NFL opens Snapchat playbook for Super Bowl Sunday — NFL and Snapchat are looking to boost engagement during an event that is not only the biggest TV show of the year but also one that is increasingly tied to mobile devices. When it comes to sports, 87% of Snapchat users favor the photo messaging app over other apps, per Snap data shared with Marketing Dive, making it a key channel as the NFL and brands seek to reach second-screening consumers during the big game. The NFL's activations touch every part of the Snapchat experience, with shows on Discover, Cameo stickers on a Super Bowl-themed Cameo story and top plays on Spotlight, the app's platform for user-generated content. The league is using Snap's technology to boost its own mobile offering, unlocking Snapchat AR experiences in the NFL One Pass app that allow users to see a virtual Lombardi Trophy, wear a team jersey or be featured in a Hollywood-themed Super Bowl movie poster. U.S. Snapchat users played with Sponsored AR Lenses over 200 million times during last year's championship game, per statistics shared by Snap, an insight that could be driving brand activations this year powered by connected Lenses, Camera Kit integrations, Marker tech, machine learning and more. Verizon partnered with Snapchat for a 5G Connected Lens that lets game attendees join an AR experience where they team up and battle other groups to take control of a giant virtual airship hovering above the field. To promote its Flamin' Hot Doritos and Cheetos products — which will come together in a gameday ad — Frito-Lay has sponsored the first-of-its-kind Snackable Screens lens that allows users to point their camera at Doritos or Cheetos snacks to reveal the dance video for ad star Megan Thee Stallion's new song "Flamin' Hottie." The video will only be available via the lens on Feb. 13 before heading to the brands' YouTube pages on Feb. 14. 'They will be blown away': NFL's next step in 'future-proofing' audience begins with Super Bowl ad — “The danger of complacency is real,” Tim Ellis, the NFL’s chief marketing officer since August 2018, told USA TODAY Sports. “Since the day I stepped into the NFL, I have been ringing the bell of urgency. We cannot afford to be complacent. We have to grow our core audiences - younger fans, female fans and Latino fans. With a sense of urgency, we have to focus on that." Note: Prior to being the EVP of Marketing at the NFL, Tim Ellis was the EVP of Marketing for Activision. Super Bowl LVI pays tribute to big game’s past with AR — To pay tribute to the city’s status as the first city to host a Super Bowl (as in Super Bowl I) in 1967, a large “curtain” that appeared to be suspended from a circular track suspended from the roof of SoFi Stadium, was digitally inserted. The curtain was “printed” with photography of the interior of the historic Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, the host of both the 1967 and 1973 Super Bowls. The curtain then opened to reveal a 3D recreation of the historic columned peristyle of the Coliseum, complete with a digitally recreated flame shooting out from the torch in the center. The 3D model also included two virtual video boards on either side of the flame as well as a recreation of the 1967 era scoreboard. Kia Launches ‘Dogmented Reality’ App Ahead Of Super Bowl — When you launch the AR experience, an adorable robotic dog with a serious case of puppy dog eyes comes to life in your personal space. Like a real pet, this robotic pooch comes with its fair share of responsibilities. You’ll need to spend time with your mechanical best friend—giving it belly rubs, scratching between its ears, and playing catch—in order to keep them healthy and happy. Think of Robo Dog as an AR version of the popular Tamagatchi Pets. Because Robo Dog is powered through 8th Wall as an AR web experience, there’s no need to download an app. You simply open up the camera on your smartphone and point it towards a unique Kia Robo Dogmented Reality QR code to launch Robo Dog, much like how you would scan a QR code located on the table of a restaurant to open a menu on your phone. Coinbase’s bouncing QR code Super Bowl ad was so popular it crashed the app — The full 60-second ad almost entirely consisted of a colorful bouncing QR code, reminiscent of the iconic bouncing DVD logo meme. When scanned, the code brought viewers to Coinbase’s promotional website, offering a limited time promotion of $15 worth of free Bitcoin to new sign ups, along with a $3 million giveaway that customers can enter. The offer is a limited time one, with new customers having until February 15th to get the $15 promotion — something that may be an issue, as Coinbase’s app is currently down, presumably due to the massive influx of traffic from the clever ad. 5G Changed the Super Bowl Experience. The Future of Retail Could Be Next — Spectators at the Super Bowl were also able to compete against one another in an augmented reality game. During pauses in on-field action, they received push notifications inviting them to participate in a game called Ultra Toss. Fans could point their phone at the field and try to toss footballs into a virtual pickup truck that appeared on the field. The mobile game debuted last year, but the prevalence of 5G allowed the NFL to roll out new features within the app in time for the Super Bowl, including a moving target and an AR overlay that tracks the stats of each section in the stadium. Erwin adds that other in-stadium features, such as sports gambling and mobile food ordering, will also benefit from better, more reliable service. And the game experience is also changing for fans watching from their couches. During the Super Bowl, viewers both in the arena and at home were able to watch the halftime show from a variety of angles, all streamed in 4K Akamai To Acquire Linode to Provide Businesses with a Developer-friendly and Massively-distributed Platform to Build, Run and Secure Applications — “The opportunity to combine Linode’s developer-friendly cloud computing capabilities with Akamai’s market-leading edge platform and security services is transformational for Akamai,” said Dr. Tom Leighton, chief executive officer and co-founder, Akamai Technologies. “Akamai has been a pioneer in the edge computing business for over 20 years, and today we are excited to begin a new chapter in our evolution by creating a unique cloud platform to build, run and secure applications from the cloud to the edge. This is a big win for developers who will now be able to build applications on a platform that delivers unprecedented scale, reach, performance, reliability and security.​” Juniper Networks Collaborates with Vodafone and Parallel Wireless on Groundbreaking Open RAN Use Case Trial — Juniper Networks (NYSE: JNPR), a leader in secure, AI-driven networks, today announced that it is working with Vodafone and Parallel Wireless, a pioneer in Open RAN solutions, conducting a multivendor RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC) trial for tenant-aware admission control use cases. The trial, initially running in Vodafone’s test labs in Turkey and with plans to move into its test infrastructure, supports O-RAN interfaces and addresses the key business challenges faced by mobile operators around personalized user experience, viable revenue generation and reduction in both CAPEX and OPEX for 4G and 5G services. The trial is based on an open, software-driven architecture that leverages virtualization to deliver more programmable, automated granular-by-user traffic management. The initial focus is on delivering tenant-aware admission control capability, enabling operators to personalize services and provide superior user experiences. Real-time tracking and enforcement of radio resources across the RAN enables mission-critical users – for example, hospitals and schools – to receive prioritized mobile data services delivery. This capability is enabled by Juniper’s rApp/xApp cloud-based software tools that manage network functions in near real-time, along with Parallel Wireless cloud-native Open RAN functions. The trial’s design philosophy is focused on demonstrating the potential of enabling open, agile resource management and mobile data delivery in any software-driven RAN environment. This approach enables services and applications to be managed, optimized and mitigated automatically by the RAN, built on real-time data insights from its own performance.

Inside LIving on the Edge episode 20, Jason and Dan discuss ARM/NVIDIA deal, IDC’s new edge marketplace predictions, net cloud native migration challenges, and the blockbuster metaverse acquisition of Activision by Microsoft in an $68.7B all cash deal. Links:The Arm deal is dead, but Nvidia is not expected to slow down Edge computing set for growth – that is, when we can agree what it is — "As edge technology continues to expand in usage in a variety of workplace environments, we are seeing growing interest in expected concurrent workload growth in areas such as business intelligence and analytics, AI/ML-related workloads, and content workloads," IDC senior research analyst Max Pepper said in a statement announcing the report. However, he added that the rapid deployment of edge computing is significantly shaping workload evolution. Maybe the real lesson of edge computing is that an edge deployment will be intended to deliver a specific solution, and that this may demand specific hardware, software, and connectivity to meet those requirements, rather than just an off-the-shelf product. In this case, the real opportunities for edge computing could lie with the systems integrators, which have the relevant skills to pull together a solution from various component parts and provide services to support customers in operating it. New report highlights cloud-native migration challenges — In almost all cases, respondents ranked the challenges in that same order: first network, then OSS, BSS, and enterprise. The only challenges that were considered more severe in an area other than the network were "in-house development and integration skills" and "development and integration tooling," where the OSS space was recognized as a greater challenge than the network. This is not surprising given that most Tier 1 carriers have dozens of OSS solutions in operation. They do much of any integration work between systems internally and some OSS systems are stand-alone – dedicated to siloed services. Those who have already deployed cloud native also consider all of the challenges in the enterprise area to be greater than the survey base as a whole and all of the challenges in the BSS area to be less of a challenge. Their firsthand experience with implementing cloud native in the network area has opened their eyes to the challenges that await them in the enterprise space. However, they are more confident that they have the support needed, near term, for BSS tasks which include billing, revenue, and customer management. Microsoft to acquire Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion — Deal was all cash. Microsoft is acquiring Activision, the troubled publisher of Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, and Diablo. The deal will value Activision at $68.7 billion, far in excess of the $26 billion Microsoft paid to acquire LinkedIn in 2016. It’s Microsoft’s biggest push into gaming, and the company says it will be the “third-largest gaming company by revenue, behind Tencent and Sony” once the deal closes. Microsoft plans to add many of Activision’s games to Xbox Game Pass once the deal closes. With the acquisition of Activision, Microsoft will soon publish franchises like Warcraft, Diablo, Overwatch, Call of Duty, and Candy Crush. “Upon close, we will offer as many Activision Blizzard games as we can within Xbox Game Pass and PC Game Pass, both new titles and games from Activision Blizzard’s incredible catalog,” says Microsoft’s CEO of gaming Phil Spencer. Xbox Game Pass now has 25 million subscribers, as Microsoft continues to acquire studios to boost the subscription service. A metaverse-loving Microsoft brings a dystopia for telcos — BT, the UK's telecom incumbent, has been documenting growth while grumbling about the implications. At first, it downplayed concern. Before lockdowns arrived in March 2020, normal daytime usage on the network ran at about 5 Tbit/s, revealed Howard Watson, its chief technology officer, in a blog at the time. The great retreat indoors sent that figure up to about 7.5 Tbit/s. No problem, said BT. Its network was built to withstand as much as 17.5 Tbit/s. But the executive tone had changed dramatically by December 2021. Spikes in Internet traffic had reignited the debate about net neutrality, the principle that stops operators from charging Internet companies for usage. A traffic tsunami of 25.5 Tbit/s was recorded on December 1, threatening to overwhelm BT systems, as a mere six soccer fixtures were streamed online by Amazon. "Of course, we invest to ensure our networks can cope with this but as demand grows further this decade we can see potential problems coming down the line," wrote Marc Allera, the CEO of BT's consumer division, in the latest BT blog. Even in the US market, where regulation is still light touch and competition is limited, major telecom stocks have declined during the pandemic. AT&T's share price has fallen 27% since the start of 2020, and Verizon's is down a tenth. Currently worth almost $2.3 trillion, Microsoft has enjoyed a 78% gain over the same period. Without something as hard to imagine as a telco-dominated metaverse, those fortunes will probably continue to diverge. Los Angeles Rams, Immersiv.io Team Up on Lens for Snap’s Next-Generation Spectacles — Immersiv.io’s Julien Deis said in a statement, “As a sports AR company, we are thrilled to create a sports fan experience of the future, and what’s better for a fan than being able to play catch with your favorite player? Through Spectacles, our focus was to design a lifelike experience that brings fan immersion to the end zone. So, we used the hand tracking technology available in Lens Studio to let fans wear a glove and catch the ball from Matt Stafford. We’re excited to experiment with the L.A. Rams to bring an innovative fan experience to life through the power of augmented reality.”

Inside LIving on the Edge episode 19, Jason and Dan discuss reality.Links:Google: Four ways CSPs can harness data, automation, and AI to create business value — According to a new study by Analysys Mason, telecommunications data volumes are growing worldwide at 20% CAGR, and network data traffic is expected to reach 13 zettabytes by 2025. To stay relevant as the industry evolves, communications service providers (CSPs) need to manage and monetize their data more effectively to: Deliver new user experiences and B2B2X services, with the “X” being customers and entities in previously untapped industries, and unlock new revenue streams. Transform operations by harnessing data, automation, and artificial intelligence (AI)/machine learning (ML) to drive new efficiencies, improved network performance, and decreased CAPEX/OPEX across the organization. Here are four key data management and analytics challenges CSPs face, and how cloud solutions can help. Reimagining the user experience means CSPs need to solve for near-real-time data analytics challenges. Driving CSP operational efficiencies requires streamlining fragmented and complex sets of tools. Leveraging cloud and automation can help CSPs reduce cost and overhead as data volumes continue to rise. Google: Five do’s and don’ts CSPs should know about going cloud-native — Do: Leverage cloud-native approaches to simplify networks Don’t: Just take legacy operational processes with you to the cloud Do: Recognize that operators will continue to own and control their networks Do: Build scale and simplicity into your data platform to unlock a whole world of use cases Don’t: Fall into the habit of architecting separate infrastructure for virtualized and containerized workloads Edge spending on track to hit $176 billion this year — In geographic terms, IDC said the US is expected to be the biggest spender at $76.5 billion this year. By comparison, Western Europe and China are expected to spend $30.6 billion and $20.8 billion respectively. As for use cases, these vary according to whether you are an enterprise or an edge services provider. IDC reckons the two biggest use cases for edge services providers in 2022 will be content delivery networks and virtual network functions. Combined, these two use cases are predicted to generate $26 billion of the $38 billion of expected service provider spending on edge this year. When it comes to enterprise use cases, the discrete and process manufacturing sectors are expected to spend a combined $33 billion on edge in 2022. Retail and professional services will spend more than $10 billion. “Edge computing continues to gain momentum as digital-first organisations seek to innovate outside of the data centre,” said Dave McCarthy, research vice president, cloud and edge infrastructure services, IDC. “The diverse needs of edge deployments have created a tremendous market opportunity for technology suppliers as they bring new solutions to market, increasingly through partnerships and alliances.” BT is one such company hoping to capitalise on the opportunity to help those so-called digital-first organisations. The telco has established a new division within its enterprise arm called ‘Division X’. It has been tasked with scaling up and commercialising BT’s 5G private networking, IoT and edge computing solutions. Oracle Sparks Cloud Contrasts in Telecom Market — “Oracle Cloud for Telcos redefines the market,” he claimed. “In addition to our public cloud regions, we offer entire cloud stacks — inclusive of hardware, scaling, refresh, patches, and upgrades — in an opex model.” The company also claims the cloud control plane resides with network operators in the public or private scenario, and all data and metadata stays within the carrier’s environment. “We expect a mix of deployments, depending on locality to a public cloud region, level of cloud adoption, as well as the customer’s compliance requirements,” Leung explained. “We believe that telco IT, OSS/BSS, and some network functions are the most likely to move to public cloud today.” BT appoints MD of advanced enterprise comms division, inks ABB contract — UK telco BT has appointed Marc Overton as managing director of its newly created Division X unit, a part of its enterprise business established to commercialise the development of unique customer solutions including components such as 5G private networks, internet of things (IoT) and edge computing. “Division X is set to be a key growth engine for BT’s enterprise business, moving it from a telco to a techco by expanding into adjacent services that go beyond traditional calls and lines,” said Overton. “I am really excited to be leading a unit that will act as an innovation hub for our enterprise customers. We will be focused on turning emerging tech like 5G, IoT, edge and AI [artificial intelligence] into solutions that we can scale, sell, and which will drive sustainable growth.” Former AT&T exec takes COO job at RingCentral — “I look forward to working with the team to build on RingCentral’s core strengths of trust, innovation and partnerships to continue our leadership position in the exciting $100B+ cloud communications opportunity." Katibeh said in a statement. The AT&T Office@Hand service is based on the RingCentral Office platform, allowing employees to work “virtually anywhere” and enhance their ability to connect with their customers. They expanded their collaboration in 2018. AT&T announced last year it was giving “plain-old-telephone-service” (POTS) a makeover with the help of RingCentral. After ruining Android messaging, Google says iMessage is too powerful — Even if Google could magically roll out RCS everywhere, it's a poor standard to build a messaging platform on because it is dependent on a carrier phone bill. It's anti-Internet and can't natively work on webpages, PCs, smartwatches, and tablets, because those things don't have SIM cards. The carriers designed RCS, so RCS puts your carrier bill at the center of your online identity, even when free identification methods like email exist and work on more devices. Google is just promoting carrier lock-in as a solution to Apple lock-in. Despite Google's complaining about iMessage, the company seems to have learned nothing from its years of messaging failure. Today, Google messaging is the worst and most fragmented it has ever been. As of press time, the company runs eight separate messaging platforms, none of which talk to each other: there is Google Messages/RCS, which is being promoted today, but there's also Google Chat/Hangouts, Google Voice, Google Photos Messages, Google Pay Messages, Google Maps Business Messages, Google Stadia Messages, and Google Assistant Messaging. Those last couple of apps aren't primarily messaging apps but have all ended up rolling their own siloed messaging platform because no dominant Google system exists for them to plug into. Aptiv Acquires Wind River for $4.3B — “All the CEOs, CIOs are realizing that the next wave is operational technology, but in order to do that I have to bring all the investments I’ve made from IT and then bring them into the OT world. Not build from scratch — bring cloud native to the OT world,” CEO Kevin Dallas told SDxCentral in an August 2021 interview. Wind River claims its software touches more than two billion edge devices across more than 1,700 customers globally, and said it generated about $400 million in revenue in 2021. Aptiv said it plans to use Wind River Studio to develop software-defined systems for the auto industry, and continue to invest and develop the platform for other industries it serves, including telecom. JOHNSON CONTROLS ACQUIRES FOGHORN, EXPANDING LEADERSHIP IN SMART AND AUTONOMOUS BUILDINGS — "Value is increasingly being created by applying intelligence at the edge-device level to create real-time, secure, actionable insights," said Johnson Controls CTO Vijay Sankaran. "By pervasively integrating Foghorn's world class Edge AI throughout our OpenBlue solution portfolio, we are accelerating the pace towards our vision of smart, autonomous buildings that continuously learn, adapt and automatically respond to the needs of the environment and people."

Inside LIving on the Edge episode 18, Jason and Dan welcome in the New Year, and a new COVID variant, with personal insights on the impact of COVID, The Economist’s take on the telco industry, what’s up with 5G and airports in the US and Helium’s bold ambitions. Links:Will the cloud business eat the 5G telecoms industry? — Then there are the political and financial barriers. European governments fret that America’s spooks will have even more access to their country’s networks if these run in American clouds (Europe has none of its own and is understandably even warier of Chinese ones). Carriers, in Europe and elsewhere, fear losing business to the tech giants like Amazon, Google or Microsoft, which have already skimmed most of the value generated by 4g mobile technology. “If all this is not financially interesting for [telecoms firms], they will try something else,” says Michael Trabbia, chief technology officer of Orange, a French mobile operator. However this plays out, the telecoms business will look very different a few years from now. The contest for control of the telecoms cloud, and particularly its “edge” (tech speak for what remains of the base station) will only heat up. Whoever is in charge of these digital gates will have the fastest access to consumers and their data, the main currency in a world of new wireless services, from self-driving cars to virtual-reality metaverses. The cloud businesses have the technological edge for now, and will try to eat as much of wireless networks as possible. The operators have relationships with customers, know how to manage networks and own the radio spectrum. Eventually, cloud providers and network operators will probably come to some kind of agreement. In the new world of mobile telecoms, neither can do without the other. “No crystal ball, but clear indications” says Samer Geissah — The evolution towards a cloud centric approach for 5G solutions and connectivity solutions will continue to accelerate and that is the challenge for connectivity service providers like TELUS. The challenge is to ensure keeping our customers in focus thus whether it is in health domain, or on the agriculture side, we are working together with our partners to ensure that we have an end-to-end view on how we conserve our costumer, ensuring that the costumer demands are the right demands for us to deliver again those objectives and ensuring that we do so, in an agile manner because the cloud world is very different from the traditional telco connectivity world. We are taking those steps towards this direction to ensure end-to-end coordination and at the end, the customer gets a service from a dependable secure by design, privacy by design which are the anchor design principles for any telco service. The team worked very hard and we depended not just on our core expertise, architects and engineers, we also have the privilege to enable and empower graduate trainees from various universities across Canada and that really is a differentiator. We are focused on enabling a new generation of engineers through the various GTLP programs which are going to be the anchor providers to our customers. That’s the real differentiator for us in TELUS. Five do’s and don’ts CSPs should know about going cloud-native — ...Gartner predicts that by 2025, cloud-native platforms will serve as the foundation for more than 95% of new digital initiatives, which is up from less than 40% in 2021. “Getting the data governance right is a critical part,” said Dr. Thomas. “We have all these different use cases that we use the data to drive business insights and value. The underlying data for it is in a common database. So as we do each use case, we will bring in new data into our data ocean, but they’ll be standardized and normalized.” In addition to data consolidation and normalization, it is essential to set standards for data quality, ownership, lifecycle management, interoperability and exchange. With that established, you can really focus on delivering that business value with 5G, IoT, and even network optimization use cases, most of which are data and analytics driven. Improving the cloud for telcos: Updates of Microsoft’s acquisition of AT&T’s Network Cloud — One key aspect of this collaboration is our respective roles—Microsoft develops the carrier-grade hybrid cloud technology that supports the AT&T mobility core network workloads. AT&T continues to select and manage the network applications (VNFs and CNFs) and their configurations to deliver mobility services to AT&T customers. As such, we're taking the AT&T Network Cloud technology, building it into Microsoft's standard hybrid cloud product, and then delivering a carrier-grade hybrid cloud solution back to the market and AT&T itself, where it can run at AT&T on-premises or on Azure public cloud. Microsoft hybrid cloud technology supports the AT&T mobility core network workloads used to deliver 5G connectivity that supports consumer, enterprise, and the FirstNet responder community. In terms of security, it’s important to note that Microsoft does not access AT&T customer data—AT&T continues to hold access to that data, and Microsoft cannot see it. Helium aims to be 'largest cellular network' in US — There are plenty of caveats to Haleem's statement. First, Haleem appears to be using the number of an operator's transmission sites as a measurement of the "biggest" operator. That's likely because Helium expects to count up to 40,000 5G small cells by the end of 2022. That would be more than the 30,000 Verizon ended 2021 with. It would also be within spitting distance of the 110,000 total macro cell towers that T-Mobile operates as it merges its operations with Sprint's network. Already Helium counts more than 400,000 LoRa transmission sites – for low-powered, slow-speed Internet of things (IoT) services – around the globe.

Inside Living on the Edge episode 17, Jason and Dan discuss the wide ranging strategies that mobile network operators are taking from network deployment to hybrid cloud. More on Private 5G with the Economist and AWS. Links:Moving core to cloud for 'suckers,' tweets BT exec after AWS outage — But a European telco backlash against these sorts of deals has begun. "Hope the folks at AWS fix their big problem and re-light their big candle – in the meantime I re-refer you to this," tweeted Neil McRae, chief architect of the UK's BT. His other tweet, the one to which he was re-referring his followers, reads: "So still want to put your network core into the public cloud? #suckers." Scott Petty, the chief digital officer of Vodafone, has been similarly scathing. "Our view would be that's too risky and that you are almost outsourcing a core competency," he said at a recent press event when discussing the AT&T arrangement with Microsoft. "You need to be able to work effectively with all the key players and move workloads around." So determined is Vodafone to avoid Snap's fate that it has even started investing in its own software tools, allowing it to move IT workloads from one environment to another. Over the next few years, it plans to add another 7,000 software engineers to the 9,000 it currently employs. European stakeholders, meanwhile, are pushing ahead with Gaia-X, a vague plan to create sovereign data infrastructure for Europe. It has been championed by bigwigs such as Timotheus Höttges, the CEO of German telco incumbent Deutsche Telekom. "If we find partners here in Europe who are driving this Gaia-X or the open-source standard for cloud infrastructure, this might help us as well in the edge environment," he told analysts on a recent call. Morgan Stanley Telecoms CTO Symposium: Telefonica Strategy for Systems and Network Evolution — 5G and Edge computing as enablers for new services requiring low latency and locality • There are services that require 1 ms of latency and cloud platform (as we know it today) can not provide support to them. • Edge computing, which brings the cloud closer to the customer. There are applications "on-premise" that can be hosted in the edge cloud. Telco Edge Cloud • Considered a complement to hyperscaler edge that allows providing differential MNO features, and further distributed topology following network core sites to deploy app loads. • GSMA operator platform definition concluded as reference to guide telco edge implementations. • Integration between 5G core and the telco edge platform to enable such features and provide a key differentiation to traditional cloud Telstra Purple launches new hybrid cloud service — The new service aims to help customers navigate their public cloud platforms from Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure, alongside Telstra Private Cloud, which has been built on Dell Technologies and VMware software to host customer data onshore. Available as a self-serve solution, Telstra Hybrid Cloud can also be fully managed by the Telstra Purple team, who is responsible for updating, patching and 24x7 monitoring, while organisations maintain control of their day-to-day virtual machine operations. Crown Castle, American Tower approach the edge differently — “As long as we own the really important pieces of network, fiber, small cell hubs, tower sites where we can put these edge data centers, we believe we are best positioned for that,” he continued. “And we don't see the need for those metro data centers to augment our offering.” It’s a different approach than tower company peer American Tower, which ramped up edge ambitions with a recent $10.1 billion deal to buy CoreSite. CoreSite’s portfolio adds 25 data centers, 21 cloud on-ramps and over 32,000 interconnections in eight major U.S. markets – significantly building on American Tower’s existing three metro and six edge data centers. He sees CoreSite as a way to boost growth rates on tower sites and extend that trend down the line as networks transition from 4G to 5G. “We think there’s an opportunity to have a whole another revenue stream created at the tower site,” he continued. “And we think the reality of that happening for us is enhanced by having direct control over these 21 critical cloud-on ramps as well as these 32,000 interconnection facilities across eight key markets in the U.S.” IBM and Telus partner on 5G edge compute solutions — Under the partnership, IBM will bring its Cloud Satellite solutions to Telus’ 5G edge computing platform, improving customers’ access to advanced AI and data analytics capabilities. By pairing the two, the partnership will allow enterprises to automatically deploy and manage latency-sensitive workloads, reaping the benefits of 5G, all through a single dashboard. Targeting the hybrid cloud environment, IBM’s Cloud Satellite allows the operator to manage applications across public and private clouds anywhere. Telus’ 5G edge computing platform brings additional benefits including low latency, secure connections, and high data availability to customers across Canada. Economist Report: Private 5G — Executives view integration with legacy systems and infrastructure complexity as some of the key barriers for implementing private 5G networks. Outsourcing to a managed service provider is a preferred approach for implementing private 5G networks, while system integration services and post- deployment network management are highly sought after when engaging with suppliers. Private 5G networks are becoming a thing, and Amazon's AWS wants to have a say on it — That’s why this new AWS Private 5G offering is so intriguing. AWS started with its cloud heritage, built the software tools necessary to run telco-focused workloads, then pieced it all together with the one element it didn’t natively have—the antennas and hardware RAN components—to create a complete solution. To be clear, AWS is partnering with RAN hardware providers, not creating its own hardware, as part of its offering. The company has yet to reveal who those partner companies are though. This is the opposite of the traditional concept of the carriers leading with a wireless network offering and then getting the necessary partners on the computing side, which they have clearly started to do Intel, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Dell, HPE, Cisco and many others have all started efforts with carriers. This also reflects the speed cloud providers are able to create solutions and potentially cut out carrier partners entirely. In many ways, the pay-as-you-go model offered by Amazon is more compelling for something like a private 5G network than its computing model because of the large upfront capital costs that private networks typically require. Q&A: AWS is on the edge, and that’s where its customers want to be — Vellante: So, AWS’ edge strategy is essentially to bring the AWS cloud to where the customers are in instances where they either can’t move or won’t move their resources into the cloud, or there’s no connectivity? Elissaios: Right. I think that you’re pointing out a very important thing, which is the common factor across all of these offerings. It is the AWS cloud; it’s not a copycat of the cloud. It’s the same API. It’s the same services that you already know and use. So, the powerful thing here is that it’s the same compute that you know and love in the cloud. The same Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance types, the Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes, the Simple Storage Service (S3), or Relational Database Service (RDS) for your databases and Elastic MapReduce (EMR) clusters. You can use the same services and the compute is the same, all the way down from the hardware up to the service.

Discussed: Ericsson buys Vonage, AWS announces Private 5G, and more.Links:Ericsson to acquire Vonage — Ericsson enters into agreement for USD 6.2 billion cash offer to acquire Vonage, a global provider of cloud-based communications, with unanimous approval of the Vonage Board of Directors Announcing preview of AWS Private 5G — Today, we are announcing the preview of AWS Private 5G, a new managed service that helps enterprises set up and scale private 5G mobile networks in their facilities in days instead of months. More on AWS Private 5G – branded to begin, partners to join, carriers included (sort of) — So AWS responded about some of the finer details in its new private 5G offer, announced yesterday. What have we learned? Not much, at least in terms of the identity of the networking partners it is using for the project. But there was some useful clarification about its direction of travel, and passing reassurance to public network operators, with which it is hammering out separate co-creation style deals at both the network edge and the ‘far’ edge.

Inside Living on the Edge episode 15, Jason and Dan discuss FedEx’s agnostic multi-cloud strategy, Google’s distributed cloud and the status of ORAN’s arrival to the global marketplace. Links:FedEx, S&P Global discuss cloud edge use cases — Robotics require low latency and real-time data processing, and they can't backhaul data to a central data center whenever they need to make decisions. To support its autonomous initiatives, FedEx uses an agnostic multi-cloud edge strategy that doesn't lock the company into a single provider, Vijayakumar said. "We don't want to be tied to any particular carrier and their MEC offerings," she said. "Our sites can't go down, so we need carrier diversity and path diversity." Additionally, FedEx locations rely mainly on compute stacks. So, if the network goes down at a site, that location can still sort packages, she added. Google: Our new distributed cloud can run from your datacenter to the network edge — "Google Distributed Cloud Hosted does not require connectivity to Google Cloud at any time to manage infrastructure, services, APIs, or tooling, and uses a local control plane provided by Anthos for operations. Google Distributed Cloud Hosted will be available in preview in the first half of 2022," Google notes. Open RAN nowhere near ready for prime time – report — "Open RAN presents an opportunity to evolve and disrupt the vendor ecosystem, bringing fresh choice for operators and supporting the emergence of a host of new companies," said Mann in prepared remarks. "Yet the path ahead will not be entirely smooth; the technology is unproven at scale and there are questions over interoperability, pricing and security. Momentum is undeniable, but it may be several years before we see a tangible impact on the market." Orange announces strategic initiatives to enhance mobile technology capabilities across Europe — 5GCroCo (Fifth Generation Cross-Border Control) is a €17-million European innovation action officially launched on November 1, 2018, with the objective to perform 5G connectivity tests and trials for the road environment in real-life scenarios. On October 21, 2021, 5GCroCo demonstrated three use cases in the corridor areas that connect the cities of Metz-Merzig-Luxembourg in France, Germany and Luxembourg, traversing three countries, two borders. The objective of 5GCroCo is to validate key 5G technologies in challenging cross-border, cross-mobile-network-operator, cross-car-original-equipment-manufacturer and cross-telco-vendor scenarios. The project concentrates in particular on cutting-edge technologies such as 5G New Radio, service continuity, mobile Edge Computing/cloud, end-to-end and predictive Quality-of-Service, network slicing, virtualisation, network support for precise positioning, and security. Furthermore, 5GCroCo is exploring innovative business models. It will contribute to the definition of the necessary policy and spectrum regulation to guarantee the success of 5G for connected and automated mobility (CAM) services. The impact of 5GCroCo is also present at the standardisation level for both the telecom and the automotive industries (3GPP, ISO, etc.). 5GCroCo is thus contributing to the consolidation of Europe’s leading role in 5G technology, paving the way for the commercial deployment of 5G for CAM in Europe and worldwide. Vertical Bridge brings the edge closer to the data — "We don't believe, in the 5G architecture, that the edge will be at a tower site," explained Bernard Borghei, executive VP of operations and co-founder of Vertical Bridge. "The edge location will be as close to where the data is generated." Borghei said that Vertical Bridge is currently working with a few wireless operators and those operators dictate where they would like their edge location to be. Vertical Bridge then uses its real estate and infrastructure expertise to develop the site and make sure it has fiber connectivity and security. It then enlists the help of its partner, EdgePresence, which builds and operates multi-tenant edge computing centers. EdgePresence then looks for additional tenants for that edge site, and manages the rack space and power consumption for each tenant. Vertical Bridge and EdgePresence are both DigitalBridge portfolio companies. Kyndryl has spun off from IBM as a $19B managed service firm — Part of that effort is helping large firms add new technologies to their enterprises. “It’s difficult to imagine moving forward on digitalization and cloud computing without rearchitecting the network--it is a foundational component,” Milton said. “Using 5G at the edge to run the vast amount of data being unlocked in the cloud is just one of the transformational areas we know are important to customers.” Researchers develop AI-based network platform recognizing face and environmen — ETRI used KOREN to test the situation recognition ability of the system's AI and its distributed data transfer capabilities. In a simulated environment, the system's AI monitored its environment near a local server to selectively detect and record emergency situations using a camera. Collected data was sent to the main server. Researchers said the smart edge network can be used with facial recognition technology to detect a missing person among a crowd of people or detect a person smoking inside a no-smoking zone.

Inside Living on the Edge episode 14, Jason and Dan discuss BT’s public cloud strategy, new LEO and MNO partnerships and what’s needed for edge native services and applications.Links:Public cloud to play a major role in ‘future BT,’ says Chief Digital Officer — “Almost all of future BT is going to run on the cloud and a big part of that is going to be on the public cloud,” noted BT’s Chief Digital and Innovation Officer, Harmeen Mehta, during a new executive interview with TelecomTV. (See Executive Interview: Harmeen Mehta on BT’s Digital Strategy.) “You will see us work very closely with them. Connectivity is a big part of the services that these public clouds provide, so there is a partnership there... and of course there are some products which we can jointly take to market... our global businesses build a lot of services on top of those [cloud platforms] to help bind a multi-cloud environment seamlessly for our customers – there's a lot of value in that. So it's a very 360-degree relationship with at least the large hyperscalers,” added Mehta, who also discussed her role at BT, the importance of open APIs and more. Enabling the Edge: Cloud Capabilities Push Satellite Forward — Dennis Gatens, co-founder and CEO of LEOcloud, a cloud infrastructure and service provider, agreed. “Data in motion results in latency and is expensive. Edge computing will drive competitive and operational advantages by moving from a centralized architecture where data is being backhauled at high volumes at significant cost and latency.” Verizon chooses Amazon as its LEO satellite buddy — The new partnership will also look at new B2B services it will enable Verizon to offer, which will include things like agricultural IoT. “Smart farms, bringing technology to agriculture, and connecting the last mile of rural America will be at the forefront of helping our industry to provide food for billions around the globe,” said Betsy Huber, President of The National Grange. “Ensuring connectivity in rural areas will be key to making these endeavours a success.” Before long every operator worth its salt will need to have an LEO-powered rural coverage strategy. There are presumably some advantages to going all-in with one LEO provider but Amazon seems like an especially big bet, given its status as the number one public cloud player. Verizon had batter make sure its relationship with Amazon, on whom it already relies for a bunch of mobile edge computing stuff, remains strong and healthy. Eclipse Foundation Launches Open Source Edge Computing Initiative — Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, said the goal is to provide a common layer of abstraction platform that can be employed across a wide range of embedded systems that are typically being deployed at the network edge. That level of fragmentation surrounding platforms that don’t provide a lot of significant differentiated value only results in slowing down the deployment of applications, noted Milinkovich. As part of that effort, a dedicated working group has been created to provide a vendor-neutral structure through which contributions to the project can be made with greater transparency. The OpenAtom Foundation was created in Beijing last year with the support of Alibaba, Baidu, Huawei, Inspur, Qihoo, Tencent and China Merchants Bank. The alliance with the Eclipse Foundation brings more traditional governance rules for building open source software to the OpenHarmony project. VMware Edge enables organizations to manage edge-native apps across multiple clouds — “A new type of workload is emerging – edge-native apps – that must run at the edge to perform as intended. AR/VR, connected vehicles, and immersive gaming are becoming mainstream. 5G has made the use of collaborative robots, drone fleets and digital twins a reality,” said Sanjay Uppal, senior vice president and general manager, Service Provider and Edge, VMware. “VMware delivers a trusted foundation – a multi-cloud edge – to help organizations move forward in the new edge reality.” VMware Rolls RIC Into Telco Cloud — The RIC and associated xApps are gaining interest among communities supporting the development of open RAN, including the Open Networking Foundation’s SD-RAN project. xApps allow operators to design and control the most important RAN functions, providing administrative RAN sovereignty over functions that are typically implemented as proprietary features on base stations. Continuous vehicle-to-vehicle communication for automated driving — As the trials showed, all the tested systems more than adequately fulfilled the stringent standards with regard to information security. Thanks to their high transmission speed and low latency, the two direct channels of communication are very well suited for use within a radius of up to 500 meters from the vehicle – for example, to immediately prepare the assistance systems for sudden hazards like emergency braking. Within a wider radius of up to 3000 meters, indirect communication via the mobile edge cloud offers benefits. By linking the vehicle’s own data with the data from other road users or the infrastructure, it is possible to implement additional, more advanced functions in the area of automated driving using these methods. Nowadays, most new trucks already come equipped with an LTE unit. By adding the direct, secure channel of communication, parallel use of the two technologies can provide the optimal solution in terms of stable, continuous data transmission. KDDI, Deutsche Telekom, MobiledgeX, Sturfee and Mawari to Demonstrate Bloom City Next-Generation AR Mobile App Experience in Alignment with GSMA Foundry Telco Edge Cloud (TEC) Trials Initiative — Jointly-developed proof of concept will feature hyper-realistic virtual human from KDDI’s au VISION STUDIO, demonstrating development and testing of XR enablers and applications harmonized across multiple mobile network operator (MNO) edge networks and infrastructures. With the 5G roll-out underway, CSPs must not cede ground to the tech titans… again — CSPs, more than others, are well positioned to grab this “cross industry orchestrator” badge that requires very specific carrier grade assets and capabilities that only they have built progressively over the years. Meanwhile, investments in 5G, cloud and networks modernisation are now increasingly at the core of public strategy programmes globally, which also augurs well for CSPs. Content is no longer king for the US telco giants — By early part of the last decade the telco industry had convinced itself that the content businesses were walking off with the profits from online and that it, and not the OTT players, needed to take a position in content to right matters. That conviction was clearly part of the motivation for both AT&T and Verizon to look to at least having a presence in content to offer the chance of creating some powerful synergies between network and applications such as video.

Inside Living on the Edge episode 13, Verizon and AWS launch private edge, Telefonica uses blockchain for tower management, Google makes it easy to shop clouds, Microsoft gets into the telco wholesale biz, non-cellular 5G is approved by the ITU and Google opens Anthos to VMs. Links:Verizon launches private mobile edge computing for enterprise with AWS Outposts — Verizon’s private mobile edge compute solution with AWS Outposts is available for enterprise customers in the U.S. Announced earlier this year, Verizon 5G Edge with AWS Outposts is a cloud computing platform that brings compute and storage services to the edge of the network on the customer premises. It enables the massive bandwidth and low latency needed to support real-time enterprise applications like intelligent logistics, factory automation and robotics. With Verizon’s On Site 5G and private edge platform, enterprises also gain operational efficiencies, higher levels of security and reliability, and improved productivity. Telefónica Tech blockchain platform bolstering telecom tower management — Telefónica plans to extend TrustOS across its entire Atrebo-managed infrastructure inventory platform by 2022. From the operational point of view, the platform will record incidences and issues, service levels, traffic data statistics, and all information relevant to changes to the infrastructure while in service. All related processes will be transparent, including maintenance operations, additions or removal of radio equipment, and leasing updates. Telefónica has broader aspirations in blockchain, including ‘tokenization’ of towers via non-fungible tokens (NFTs) that can be used to sell tower rights or enable new tower investment vehicles; while the NFT opportunity has yet to be defined, it potentially provides the ability to buy and sell tower interests in a way that allows network operators and tower companies to maximize the value of their assets. The cost of cloud at the edge of reason — Google, which after all was the inventor of Kubernetes, also appears to be moving towards encouraging ‘proper’ multi-cloud capabilities - presumably because that’s what its customers are demanding. At its annual cloud conference this month, Google Cloud made a general release of a data warehousing service that lets its users tap into data held on a different cloud, presumably where the cost of storage is lower. So the future may not be so much about users being assisted in making a cloud jailbreak to get to lower prices, but being given the ability to shop around their multi-clouds - without penalties and performance issues - to buy specific disaggregated services, just the way God intended. Azure edges closer to the telco model — So the most important announcement, to my mind with the whole transformation process, was that Microsoft is going to take up a wholesale position on network services for 5G operators by selling advanced, high quality transmission and routing services on a global basis. That pretty much escaped notice where once it would have created a major stir. The hybrid cloud tug-of-war gets real — How does this relate to the edge? Well, we’re not going to talk much about the “internet of things” today, but suffice it to say, developers will win the edge and right now, they’re coding in the cloud. Of course, they’re often coding in the cloud and moving work on-prem with containers, but watch how sticky that model is for the respective players. We believe those with the strongest developer ecosystems will be in a much better position to thrive in the edge thanks to its diversity and fragmentation. World’s first non-cellular 5G technology, ETSI DECT-2020, gets ITU-R approval, setting example of new era connectivity — echnology-wise the non-cellular 5G is built on completely different principles from cellular 5G. One of the biggest differences – and advantages – is the decentralized network. In a non-cellular 5G network, every device is a node, every device can be a router – as if every device was a base station. The devices automatically find the best route; adding a new device into the network routing works autonomously as well and if one device is down, the devices will re-route by themselves. It means reliable communication eliminating single point of failures. Google and Dell offer new tools to help operators manage 5G and the edge — Dell’s new Bare Metal Orchestrator makes it possible to manage hundreds of thousands of servers across the globe and saves days and weeks of configuration and provisioning. For a carrier looking to bring a new service to market as quickly as possible and react to changing market trends, that’s a lot of time being served. Google opens Anthos to VMs, streamlines Azure, AWS container management — Anthos, the company’s hybrid cloud platform, uses Google’s own Kubernetes container system. This now enables Google customers to standardize on Kubernetes, while continuing to run some VM workloads which can’t be easily containerized. “While we have seen many customers make the leap to containerization, some are not quite ready to move completely off of virtual machines (VMs). They want a unified development platform where developers can build, modify, and deploy applications residing in both containers and VMs in a common, shared environment,” said Google VPs Jeff Reed and Chen Goldberg in a blog post.

Inside Living on the Edge episode 12, Jason and Dan discuss Google’s next step into the edge cloud, evolution of the mobile app, multi-cloud enabling best of breed services, movement of cloud to decentralize, optimizing the drive thru experience at Wendys using mobile edge and AI. Links:Introducing Google Distributed Cloud—in your data center, at the edge, and in the cloud — Available in preview today, Google Distributed Cloud Edge is a fully managed product that brings Google Cloud’s infrastructure and services closer to where your data is being generated and consumed. Google Distributed Cloud Edge empowers you to run 5G Core and radio access network (RAN) functions at the edge, alongside enterprise applications, to support mission-critical use cases such as computer vision and Google AI edge inferencing. Google Distributed Cloud Edge is ideal for running local data processing, low-latency edge compute workloads, modernizing on-premises environments, and deploying private 5G/LTE solutions across a variety of industries. With Google Distributed Cloud Edge, retailers can provision applications at a Google network location, which allows in-store teams to focus on customers rather than sorting out IT. Manufacturers can save time and money by using video for visual inspections on factory floors, and CSPs can offer high-speed bandwidth with private 5G and localized compute to their customers. The Inevitability of Multi-Cloud-Native Apps — Uber and Twitter public disclosures describe how the multi-cloud-native model is an integral part of their strategic game plan. Hybrid and multi-cloud are part of this, too, leveraging Kubernetes as a cluster manager, but they still need tools to manage all those clusters across multiple environments in multiple regions at planet scale. The bottom line is that the architecture that webscale companies are using today is the same one enterprises will need to adopt tomorrow to remain competitive. Alternatively, these enterprises will cede market share and relevance to the next webscale innovator to disrupt an industry. In adopting this model of building multi-cloud-native apps, enterprises will have to deal with unified access management, controlling multiple clusters, resource management and more, all across multiple regions and clusters of capacity, aggregating versus disaggregating cluster resources, using logical services that span clouds versus namespaces that span a single cluster. The Real Value Of Multi-Cloud: Getting Best-In-Breed Cloud Services — In general, the best-in-breed concept is simple. Companies will allow their app teams to select the higher-level services that best meet their needs across clouds. Examples of these higher-level services include databases, messaging systems and AI/ML services. Rather than looking at public clouds as monoliths (either going all-in on a public cloud and using all of its services or using none of them), app teams are encouraged to compare specific services within clouds and from third parties to see how well they meet their needs. The basic precept of the best-in-breed concept is to look at clouds and third parties as simply collections of services that can be mixed and matched as an app team's needs dictate. This can provide much greater optionality to app teams and allow them to get the best experience and functionality in building and operating their applications. Today’s cloud environments are hardly all-encompassing, one-size-fits-all solutions. — It’s important to weigh enterprise connectivity options — internet, direct connections or working with an exchange broker that offers direct connections to multiple cloud service providers. “All three are valid depending on your maturity,” Rials says. “All three should be considered.” As with cloud orchestration platforms, it’s important the underlying network infrastructure can manage connectivity across multiple cloud providers. “Design your network infrastructure upfront so you have toolsets that are not native to specific cloud service providers, but that are cloud agnostic,” Rials says. Living On The Edge: How Next-Gen Mobile Networks Will Drive The Evolution Of Cloud Computing — If 5G-enabled edge computing is going to happen, cloud providers also need to adapt the cloud architectures they’ve helped develop for this new decentralized model. For example, developers need to be able to localize applications to reduce service latency; alleviate variance/jitter; ensure the resilience/survivability of operations in the event of an outage; leverage data efficiently (e.g., perform machine learning at the edge, data transformations, aggregations, or time-series analyses); or simply avoid costs associated with data transmission. In short, the need to develop new experiences that operate in edge environments requires cloud providers to create an open, efficient, and consistent environment enabling the cloud developer community to thrive. Telefónica Deutschland / O2 showcases solutions for networking real-time applications — Telefónica Deutschland / O2 is presenting applications from a total of four industry sectors at the world's leading congress for international transport systems, the ITS World Congress in Hamburg. Among other things, Telefónica Deutschland / O2 and partners such as Continental, T-Systems, Deutsche Telekom and MobiledgeX will use a traffic collision warning app to demonstrate the technical interaction of two otherwise separate communication networks in real time. Wendy’s enhance mobile drive thru ordering with AI — Wendy’s Company intends to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) and hybrid cloud tools to create new ways customers can order food via touchpoints including drive-thru and mobile device. The fast food hamburger chain will utilize Google Cloud data analytics, AI, machine learning (ML), and hybrid cloud technology, such as speech-to-text and Google search and maps to streamline customer access. Google Cloud will serve as Wendy’s preferred cloud provider.