Bell Canada intends to be the first Canadian operator with a 5G multi-access edge compute (MEC) service paired with Amazon Web Services (AWS) later this year. The carrier inked a deal with AWS to deploy the hyperscaler’s Wavelength service, which marries 5G networks with edge compute and storage. 

The service will be live in Toronto by the end of this year, followed by Montreal in the first quarter of 2022, and Vancouver in spring 2022, Jeremy Wubs, SVP of product marketing at Bell Canada, told SDxCentral in a phone interview.

“We’re going to expand from there,” he said. “It kind of depends on the use cases, the demand. Certain cities in Canada have higher concentrations of certain types of industries as you’d expect. So depending on what the hot use cases are in each of those geographic regions, that will determine which Wavelength areas we focus on next.”

Bell’s agreement with AWS isn’t exclusive, but rather “the first of many 5G MEC announcements,” Wubs said. The carrier wants to combine its networks with a “catalog of the best destinations, whether that’s AWS, whether that’s Google, or Microsoft. Our customers are going there, they’re looking for better performance in the journey to leverage those environments.”

AWS earned the first nod because Bell was impressed with the overall experience and pace of development the world’s largest public cloud provider already has underway with many global operators, Wubs explained. AWS has also snagged telco cloud deals with Verizon, Vodafone, SK Telecom, and Dish Network, which plans to house everything it can in AWS, well beyond the edge.

Amazon also provides Bell with an opportunity to tap into a strong developer community, and many of Bell’s large enterprise customers in Canada are also big users of AWS, Wubs said. Bell is also moving some of its internal business applications and IT stacks to AWS.

Bell Plans Expansive Telco Cloud Use

“We’ve talked with a lot of large enterprises and governments in Canada to measure interest and understand how they might use it,” Wubs said. Some organizations are, like Bell, interested in moving business applications to the cloud to improve performance. Other companies are exploring the use of MEC for augmented reality and smart manufacturing, he said.

The operator hasn’t yet determined the latency rate it expects to reach on its MEC with AWS, but other operators routinely identify latency rates below 10 milliseconds as the goal. Bell is waiting to get Wavelength nodes deployed and broaden its 5G network, including the future use of millimeter-wave spectrum, which is being auctioned in Canada this year, before it lands on a latency rate it can guarantee to customers, Wubs explained.

Bell is also looking ahead to more expansive use of public clouds for its network infrastructure. “One our wireline network, we’ve virtualized a number of functions on the edge of our network and virtualized a number of functions in the core of our network,” Wubs said. 

“The second phase of that is virtualizing more on the mobility side with the 5G network, and that happens in two streams,” he said. “There’s some things that we’re going to operate and manage ourselves, and put our own compute fabric and virtualize those components… Then there’s some other pieces that we see being able to shift over to the hyperscalers and really operate on their cloud platforms.”

Bell’s network core and radio access network both fall under the scope of that vision, he said. “We have a pretty robust plan to virtualize more of our network and leverage the hyperscalers, and virtualize components ourselves.”