The continuous promotion of 5G commercial use accelerates edge computing to enter the landing development period. IDC predicts that by 2020, more than 50 billion devices and devices will be connected globally, with more than 50% of the data required to be stored, processed, and analyzed at the network edge. According to the forecast of the Information and Communication Institute, the scale of the marginal market will exceed one trillion in the future.

Under the huge market prospect, operators have accelerated the commercial development and deployment of mobile edge computing. Edge computing is expected to become an important catalyst for future operator business model innovation and promote the continuous deepening of digital transformation.

Edge computing is an inevitable choice in the 5G era

Edge computing, a subclass of cloud computing, as the core technology of 5G, can provide edge intelligence services near the edge of the network near the source of things or data, in this regard, MichaelClegg, vice president of Supermicro Internet of Things, made an image explanation: “A good analogy is a popular pizza restaurant that opens smaller branches in more areas because the pies it bakes at its main location get cold on their way to distant customers.”

5G MEC has become an important channel and carrier for the opening of operators’ network and edge capabilities. 5G calls for edge computing, and the reason is highly consistent with the network characteristics of large bandwidth (eMBB), large-scale connection (mMTC), ultra-low time delay and high reliability (uRLLC) in the 5G era.

First, it meets the requirements of 5G low-latency services. Edge computing allows more applications to run at the edge, reducing latency caused by data transmission speed and bandwidth limitations. In intelligent driving, the edge computing platform is deployed at the access network end, and the cloud service environment is built at the access network end to reduce delay and improve transmission efficiency. Also in intelligent monitoring, cold chain transport vehicles and goods can be monitored and warned, and intelligent image analysis such as millisecond face recognition and object recognition can be realized.

The second is to reduce the occupation of some broadband by 5G large video services. 5G video services are booming, posing a huge challenge to the bandwidth of the network, such as eMBB’s demand for network bandwidth up to hundreds of Gbps, thus increasing the transmission pressure of the backpass network, if it can be processed at the edge, you do not need to return to the core network through the transmission network, thereby reducing the occupation of large bandwidth video services on the backbone network resources.

The third is to realize 5G service and data localization processing to meet security requirements. In the 5G era, the Internet of everything, the number of global Internet of things devices in 2019 reached 10.7 billion, an increase of 17.58%, and is expected to increase by 19% in 2020 to 12.7 billion, if you do not use edge computing, there is a security risk of Internet of Things data being intercepted.

Gartner predicts that by 2025, 75% of all data will be generated and processed at the edge. The China Academy of Information and Communication Technology predicts that the edge computing market will exceed one trillion in the future, becoming an emerging market equal to cloud computing.

Operators force edge computing deployment

With the rise of edge computing, operators are also actively exploring and deploying edge computing to revitalize network edge resources. In the United States, AT&T led the establishment of the CORD project in 2016, hoping to transform operators’ traditional networks into network services based entirely on open hardware and open software cloud.

In recent years, China’s three major operators are also accelerating their layout.

While exploring MEC and industrial edge cloud, China Telecom has cut into edge computing from three aspects: overall IDC/CDN resource layout and business planning, operator gateway/equipment, and MEC-based business platform and solution.