GA

Wednesday 19 October 2016

Multi Access -MEC, with local break-outs and hyper dense spectrum for enterprise traffic engineering

Earlier this month, the MEC industry standards group received an updated mandate from ETSI, extending work for a further two years. This was done, in part, to the need to make MEC available across all access networks, from today’s LTE to tomorrow’s 5G, as well as wireline and wireless LANs. And speaking of cellular, at some point the 3GPP will no doubt be looking to subsume MEC into its ongoing cellular standardisation work – so what can the MEC group do now to prepare for the inevitable, and how can it help 3GPP and not duplicate work activities?

Meanwhile, vendors from the telecoms and enterprise sectors are developing edge computing solutions today. The enterprise remains a lucrative market for telcos, but they don’t want to repeat the approach originally made with small cells – i.e. buy small cells from us and help us alleviate network congestion. Enterprise IT buyers are savvy customers and they will only play ball if they get true benefits. This then leads into a discussion about where the “edge” actually is, and how far it extends into the core network.

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