MobiledgeX CEO prescribes solution to treat network extremities. Nick Booth reports.
The GSMA has appointed MobiledgeX CEO Jason Hoffman as co-chairman of the GSMA TEC (telco edge cloud) group. Here Hoffman tells Mobile Europe how he is running his surgery and advises them on likely operations.
GSMA wanted its mobile edge steering to be shared by an operator paired with a non-operator. Telefonica’s Juan Carlos Garcia is the operator representative and co-chair with Hoffman, who was chosen for his track record and expertise in creating use cases.
Hoffman is a former ‘triple play cancer specialist’ who was lured into the technology by the need to build a better system for his vocation. Hoffman found that his three major work processes of seeing patients, researching cures and teaching other medics was obstructed. It needed better, more accessible data foundations. While creating them he accidentally formed the beginnings of big data giant Joyent and took himself to the edge of networking. He then went on to run MobiledgeX.
Having mobilised his own data to the edge, in response to outside forces, Hoffman was seen as the ideal candidate to help mobile operators with a similar challenge. Now he’s examining mobile operators, taking their vital signs and probing their organs. He’s searching for classic symptoms of stress in a condition where ‘the web, mobile and social networks are drawn up into the cloud and crystallised’.
Why are operators being driven the edge?
Hofmann is asking questions, such as: Which ‘over edge’ native application services will launch in the next 12 months to drive emerging developer adoption? What problems still remain to be solved to improve functionality and make sure everything just works? How can these services take form and function and expand so everything just works?
“Edge computing and 5G are the yin and yang: if operators are deploying 5G, they’re not rolling out edge and edge is the monetisation mechanism for 5G,” said Hoffman. “2021 saw a lot of development on 5G front with edge taking more of a back seat. We’re expecting the opposite in 2022.”
MobileEdgeX has been the primary mover in a number of telco edge computing partnership involving operators, network software developers, Deutsche Telekom and cloud natives, supporting dozens of edge cloudlets across the world.
Are we entering cloud era hysteria?
In November Deutsche Telekom’s corporate blogger Norbert Rieple argued, in a DT blog, that telcos may have been rushed into a mistake by cloud era hysteria. “Many have done away with their data centers. But there are reasons why some things must be computed and stored on-site again,” Rieple writes. The mood of the forums of TEC members seem to suggest there are multiple questions they want to address about the cloud shaping mobile metworks.
In response GSMA TEC aims to create a global edge computing service so that developers, enterprises and integrators can create services that run at the edge of federated telco networks. To date there are no other open computing movements working on this niche.
In the first multi-country trial, Telefonica, Deutsche Telekom and MobiledgeX managed to combine their computing and comms capacities successfully to support a differentiated ‘extended reality’ (XR) gaming experience.
How GSMA wants to cure net neuropathy
GSMA has two projects, with the Open Platform Proup (OPG) tackling the infrastructure at one extreme and the TEC tackling the other end of the problem, according to Hoffman.
“TEC was meant to start by finding and running good edge use cases. What we have in both groups is from the respective sides of the problem moving in and filling in details until we meet in the middle,” said Hoffman. That why you might see the OPG focussing on what application programming interfaces (APIs) the operators should use and how they should be use. “That’s of interest to us too,” said Hoffman, who now chairs OPG’s API group.
What problems does TEC face?
The first problem is building a catalogue of every use case for telco edge computing, according to Hoffman.
MobiledgeX and Deutsche Telekom have compiled telco edge computing research data from their initial work but there are still many sceptics to be convinced.
Hoffman says mobile operators need to asks themselves questions. Such as: Is there a long-term definition of ‘edge’ that would be recognised by application developers? And what are the real functional characteristics of mobile edge tech?
“We concluded that the edge does have a long-term defensible, functional and technical set of characteristics,” says Hoffman.
Introducing Edge Natives
This was how the phrase edge native was coined. It refers to a location and topology specific need for computing and data within the app. All devices out there are really edge devices in a specific location with known network topology sitting on top of them. The devices are mobiles carried by humans carrying them or devices carried in cars and other autonomous machines.
What are the features of that edge? There are edge native apps that would use edge app services that sit on top of an edge native infrastructure, according to Hoffman. “We already said edge has certain characteristics and a definition that distinguishes it from cloud native. Cloud apps can run anywhere. Edge apps have to run somewhere. There’s enough of a core requirement that lets us distinguish,” Hoffman said.
What are these edge apps up to?
GSMA TEC’s next problem was to categorise these edge applications by function, such as flow applications, streaming or the new, increasingly popular ‘metaverse apps’. Now that Facebook is named as Meta it’s likely that all its traffic will be lumped into that category but Hoffman said that’s potentially a good thing. When Web 2.0, mobile and social became jointly categorised by a lot applications that was helpful in driving the cloud’s development, said Hoffman.
The next consideration was over control and traffic management systems around autonomous devices. Many flow-style applications need a big pipeline for their bi-directional stream of data, with incoming video, computer vision and artificial intelligence (AI) cases in point. “Those guys need edge, there’s a role for edge to play and that’s a good category of applications,” said Hoffman
Facebook has made the metaverse?
The metaverse and other types of autonomous control system are another complication, says Hoffman. “Recently we realised within TEC that the network itself is an edge workload. That leads to these types of problems about how it relates to what’s being done in the Open RAN space. This is all getting aligned now.”
“I feel comfortable with edge devices, what edge native is, the functional categories of edge native app services, what we’re moving onto now is the last big question to be answered,” said Hoffman
The Edge native application services movement needs an operator community to support all these emerging devices and applications, said Hoffman. When Amazon created AWS its name spelled out the mission: Web services. “That’s what they launched with: app services for native web apps. As an operator community, we have to think about native edge services we’re launching for edge apps. That’s the question we have to answer next. And out of all the questions, it’s the most critical,” said Hoffman
Can GSMA galvanise mobile developers?
“Developers can’t just do this on their own. For web developers to exist, the web must exist, for the web to exist, the internet must exist. As an operator community, we have to step up with edge native app services that make it easy for web and application developers to launch these next-gen apps,” said Hoffman.
Hoffman says it’s about making an industrywide framework as simple and adoptable as possible. “The operator community is very good at launching and running services. There are some great examples of game-changing services: think of text, SMS and mobile roaming. There are good example of core services that will make your smartphone work anywhere, according to Hoffman: “For edge to be successful, we have to plug into that vein of thinking.”