Results from a survey of operators on the importance of the edge in 5G network and service strategies showed that the majority of respondents believe that owning access networks and edge cloud resources gives them an advantage over off-network cloud providers. Below is an excerpt from that study.
Does ownership of access networks and edge cloud infrastructure enable mobile service providers to offer superior end-to-end performance guarantees for 5G compared to public cloud providers?
The chart shows how operator opinions differ across the four different scenarios in the study. A significant 40% of operators believe that being able to host applications in their edge data centers will give them a competitive advantage over cloud players (who do not have edge network access or resources). Another 22% expect benefits even if the service provider “hosts the application in its central data center.” The 11% is also significant, as it means that even if the application is hosted in a public cloud, the operator can still play a role in ensuring the application’s performance. In total, 73% of respondents therefore believe that owning the access network and/or cloud assets allows operators to offer higher end-to-end performance guarantees in 5G compared to public cloud providers.
By definition, if you distribute functions and applications, you also need to distribute monitoring of network access and edge cloud resources. And because this edge environment is no longer static, monitoring must be more dynamic. Implementing distributed monitoring within the old model of probes and taps on network equipment interfaces is simply too expensive and limits the speed at which the network can adapt to changing demand or new capabilities.
High-impact services that transform business processes and customer outcomes clearly require service level agreements (SLAs) with accurate and timely reporting, as well as the ability to anticipate and respond to changing network conditions. The good news is that 5G architecture provides operators with a platform to define service level monitoring. 5G allows them to take a holistic view of what a service needs in terms of network capabilities and associated SLAs and KPIs, and apply this from the edge to the core.
Source: Lightreading.com
