The roll-out began in early 2021 in the UK and Germany at a few city sites; a pilot in southern Spain is next
Vodafone Business is to expand its collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to offer customers across multiple European countries high bandwidth with the ultra-low latency of distributed multi-access edge computing (MEC).
Spain is the latest Vodafone market to embed AWS Wavelength at the edge of its 4G and 5G with a pilot in pilot AWS Wavelength Zone available to customers across the province of Andalusia in southern Spain, including the cities of Malaga, Granada, Córdoba (pictured), Jaén, Almería plus areas of Seville.
The roll-out of MEC via AWS began in Germany and the UK, in the cities of London, Manchester, Berlin, Munich and Dortmund. No deadline was mentioned for the roll-out of MEC in Vodafone’s other European markets.
Better road safety
One of the first applications to be tested in Spain is better road safety based on Vodafone’s Safer Transport for Europe Platform (STEP). The connects drivers directly with transport authorities and each other, to provide enables safety information, hazard warnings and traffic updates in real time, regardless of the device or in-vehicle system they use.
The STEP platform will feed real-time data to the national transport data platform, operated by The Directorate-General for Traffic (DGT). It will also help refine automotive test capabilities for DEKRA (a vehicle testing, inspection, and certification organisation) in Málaga and be used to improve the safety of highway maintenance workers and to control smart traffic lights.
Extending reality
Vodafone Spain will test Extended Reality which could be applied to use cases in agriculture, logistics, industry, entertainment, or social health with a 3D digital twin of critical applications. This is intended to allow users to make almost changes remotely.
The plan is for MEC to build on and augment many applications in development or use across various sectors in Germany and the UK, such as for driving autonomous shuttle buses or instantly detecting defects in a production line. More than 30 companies have completed a pilot with Vodafone’s Edge Innovation programme in the UK and Germany with MEC capabilities.
Jennifer Didoni, Head of Cloud, Edge & Mobile Private Networks, Vodafone Business, said: “Working with AWS, Vodafone Business can deliver applications and IT tool to customers in milliseconds, faster than the human eye or ear can even perceive.
“By bringing these services closer to the customer across Germany, Spain, and the UK, they can access Apps on tap in more places, in high definition, at machine speed, with performance that wasn’t possible before.”