Deutsche Telekom Completes World’s First Public Mobile Edge Network, Powered By MobiledgeX Edge-Cloud R1.0

MobiledgeX, which is helping operators make edge infrastructure widely accessible and easy to use for third parties, today announced it has released MobiledgeX Edge-Cloud R1.0, which is powering the world’s first public mobile edge network deployment with Deutsche Telekom in Germany and live developer trials in the network. The solution connects mobile users to application cloud containers created by aggregating existing operator network resources. These containers execute close to end devices, meeting the stringent performance requirements of next- generation mobile innovations. MobiledgeX Edge-Cloud R1.0 is now in general availability globally and already supporting the prototyping of developer use cases in public networks.

Walter Goldenits, CTO of Telekom Deutschland in Germany, said: “Deutsche Telekom is proud to lead a global effort toward a smart, mobile, digital society and recognizes that ubiquitous edge availability is the foundation for this vision. For operators, Edge-Cloud R1.0’s ability to quickly aggregate existing 4G and 5G resources and make them available anywhere they are needed across the network means an extremely low barrier to entry for scalable edge deployments that can be immediately monetized. When edge networks are deployed widely, developers and device makers can more easily define business and use cases for new offerings that can be rolled out across a large number of users. The milestone announced today is an important moment not just for Deutsche Telekom and MobiledgeX, but the broader mobile ecosystem eager to capitalize on the massive edge opportunity in the lead-up to 5G.”

MobiledgeX Edge-Cloud R1.0 Supporting Mobile’s Most Promising Edge Use Cases

For developers, MobiledgeX Edge-Cloud R1.0 enables application containers to be deployed with the same simplicity as over-the-top, hyperscale datacenter-based cloud providers. At runtime, MobiledgeX Edge-Cloud R1.0 spins up the containers on-demand in edge cloud locations (also known as “cloudlets”) that optimally fulfill the needs of the desired application and user quality of experience. The solution powers compelling new use cases already live in networks today, including:

• Automatically deploying application backends close to users based on their Verified Location and Identity. MobiledgeX Edge-Cloud R1.0 instantiates application containers to support streaming workloads similar to lambda functions ideally suited for increasingly immersive and massively multi- user workloads like multi-player gaming, robotics and AR maintenance that must ascertain trusted identity and location. The built-in “verified location” service automatically correlates GPS-reported location from the device using telemetry extracted from the mobile service provider’s infrastructure and directs mobile client to appropriate edge location.
• Augmented Reality and Mixed Reality Performance Support. Makes lower latency available natively in the mobile network and geographically closer to end user devices. Enables AR and MR experiences on smart glasses or wearables where these devices do not natively provide the required CPU and GPU hardware capabilities, either due to cost, weight or power consumption reasons.
  
• Video and Image Processing That Meets Local Privacy Regulations. Platform guarantees in- country containment and privacy of user data, offering country-specific control planes that ensure country-specific applications and data remain in the country to satisfy GDPR and other privacy regulations.

MobiledgeX customers and partners are already using MobiledgeX Edge-Cloud R1.0 to enable a new breed of mobile applications.

Diana Hu, Head of Augmented Reality Platform for Niantic, said: “We’ve been hard at work on technology that bridges the physical and digital worlds to pave the way for new entertainment experiences. To achieve shared, multiplayer experiences, and translate environments in real time, Niantic’s platform requires a low latency network and high bandwidth to enable a large number of users to play shared AR experiences. Edge software makes deployment and discovery of backend services very easy. MobiledgeX Edge-Cloud R1.0 delivers just that.”

Piotr Wojcik, Co-founder and CEO/CTO for 1000 realities said “Access to edge is ‘make or break’ for our business to work and scale, without the need for an on-premise local data center. Access to existing mobile operator infrastructure and edge services via MobiledgeX allows us to seamlessly scale our business faster and without the need for additional effort.”

Breakthrough Edge Capabilities for Operators and Developers

MobiledgeX Edge-Cloud R1.0 delivers the following new key features:

• Device and platform-independent SDKs for Android and IOS devices in Java, C++, C# or REST that support edge node discovery, built-in identity and verified location services, with the ability to connect automatically to the nearest edge location. MobiledgeX will release these SDKs as open source to speed development times and flexibility.
• A Distributed Matching Engine (DME) that is natively borne and integrated into Telekom Deutschland’s mobile network in Germany. The DME allows developers to ensure the identity and location of application users while guaranteeing their privacy as this data remains within the boundaries of the mobile service provider and is not disclosed to MobiledgeX.
• A fully multi-tenant control plane that supports zero-touch provisioning of edge cloud resources via a Cloudlet Resource Manager. This architecture is massively scalable based on the number of distributed edge cloud locations and enables the operator to bring any combination of compute, storage and network resource pools to add to capacity independently of a preferred Virtualization Infrastructure Management (VIM) layer. For example, while Deutsche Telekom edge cloud resource pools are virtualized using OpenStack, MobiledgeX Edge-Cloud R1.0 equally supports other industry- standard VIMs such as VMware or native Kubernetes.
• A global edge cloud SAAS portal that allows operators to visualize application delivery performance and developers to deploy their application containers.

MobiledgeX Edge-Cloud R1.0 will be on display powering one of the latest edge use cases in the Deutsche Telekom booth in Hall 3 at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.