Telecom operators are rapidly expanding their 5G edge network deployments and potential use cases to monetize those assets and help fuel future expansion. But, those efforts need to be focused in order to take advantage of broader partnerships and prevent wasting precious resources.

Channa Seneviratne, executive for technology development and solutions for Australia-based telecom operator Telstra, noted during the recent Red Hat Open5G Event three specific areas of focus telecom operators need to focus on with their edge deployments.

“The first thing is being very clear on what the right use cases are that we want to go after first,” Seneviratne said.

Operators have talked about taking advantage edge deployments can provide in terms of lower latency to support unique use cases like autonomous vehicle control and augmented/virtual reality scenarios. Andrea Caldini, VP of network engineering at Verizon, recently told SDxCentral that this also includes the need for better multi-access edge computing (MEC) integration.

“As you’re creating these solutions, you’re looking to have your workloads closer, so you might have a low-latency need and need to have that workload closer,” Caldini said, adding that this private and public MEC integration then allows an enterprise to adjust where they want to run applications and still have it all under strict control. “They all come together as you create these new services to support a business need.”

Seneviratne further explained that telecom operators need to also be very clear on how they want to partner with hyperscalers in addressing the network edge. This is important as telecom operators and those hyperscalers like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, and Google are approaching the telecom edge market from different directions, but need each other to provide a complete enterprise product.

“As a telco you need to be very clear where you're going to bring value into their partnership, and for us, edge compute combined with 5G together is where we think it's a very strong differentiator for Telstra and I think for telcos,” he said. “Establishing the partnering arrangement, you've got to have the right business model, and that's really important because the partnership has got to be one where everyone gets a slice of the pie, whether it's a point solution that we go to, or … where you have wide-scale edge compute, and you expose services to make sure that you get to monetize more than just connectivity.”

Seneviratne added that the connectivity component is the real strength of telecom operators in this model, “but we need to be able to monetize up the stack as well.”

The final focus area is security, network, and resiliency, which plays into ongoing enterprise fears in moving their workloads outside of their walled environment.

“If you've got partnerships with multiple partners, we think of hybrid cloud and multicloud, you have to think about how are you going to manage these workloads,” Seneviratne said. “If you work with, say, multiple hyperscalers, we would expect that they would bring their orchestrators, for example, to manage their resources. But the end-to-end service we think is something that the telco should manage, the end-to-end service orchestration. Why? Because that's important when we think about resiliency.”

As an example, Seneviratne said that if a use case involves 5G and edge compute working together to solve low latency and there is a failure at a specific edge location, there needs to be a way to quickly shift that workload to an adjacent site.

“That requires a level of sophistication in the orchestration around discovery of alternate edge compute locations, and then managing the failover gracefully and managing the workloads,” Seneviratne said. “That is complex orchestration, and that's something that you need to bring some thought into how you apply that.”

These focus areas should help operators find the sweet spot in terms of time and financial investments, but also help bolster the broader market toward better solving challenging use cases.

“It's not just about just putting edge compute in different locations. There's a whole ecosystem that you need to bring to play to make it work successfully,” Seneviratne added.