London-based Global System for Mobile Communications (GSMA) is supporting leading operators China Unicom, Deutsche Telekom, EE, KDDI, Orange, Singtel, SK Telecom, Telefonica and TIM in developing an interoperable platform to make edge compute capabilities widely and easily available, the company said.
The platform to be developed in 2020, will make local operator assets and capabilities, such as latency, compute and storage available to application developers and software vendors enabling them to fulfil the needs of enterprise clients.
Operators have agreed to work together to develop an Edge Compute architectural framework and reference platform, and the GSMA has launched an Operator Platform Project to support this exciting operator initiative. Initially, the platform will be deployed across multiple markets in Europe and progressively extended to other operators and geographies to achieve global reach.
Operators can offer enterprises unmatched proximity to their customers and deliver high performance. For enterprises, these capabilities create an opportunity for expansion to local or international markets whilst maintaining compliance with local regulatory and data protection laws.
The GSMA´s Operator Platform Project intends to develop a framework for operators to expose and monetise their network capabilities. Operators will offer through the Operator Platform edge compute, storage and connectivity to their customers leveraging their existing relationships with enterprises who already have use cases requiring edge, their vast local footprint/real estate, an inimitable position for stringent security and data privacy, residency, sovereignty and the organisational competence from the experience of providing highly reliable (five nines) services over a distributed and capillary network environment.
The GSMA represents the interests of mobile operators worldwide, uniting nearly 750 operators with almost 300 companies in the broader mobile ecosystem, including handset and device makers, software companies, equipment providers and Internet companies, as well as organisations in adjacent industry sectors. The GSMA also produces industry-leading events such as Mobile World Congress, Mobile World Congress Shanghai, Mobile World Congress Americas and the Mobile 360 Series of conferences.
