The edge internet economy will surpass $4.1 trillion by 2030, according to a study by Chetan Sharma Consulting commissioned by software vendor AlefEdge.

And operators, which own prime real estate in this economy, will potentially play a starring role.

For comparison: the global economy in 2019 will hit $75 trillion. Of this, the cloud economy is worth about $1 trillion, the mobile economy’s at $3.9 trillion, and the internet economy is $4.5 trillion.

Edge Internet Economy: The Multi-Trillion Dollar Ecosystem Opportunity concludes that existing use cases like advertising and healthcare will drive initial growth. But new use cases — the whitepaper identifies more than 20 across all industries including fleet management and manufacturing — will become more widespread as developers take advantage of the edge architecture.

By “edge internet,” Chetan Sharma, author of the whitepaper, means moving compute, storage, and networking resources from a centralized cloud to the edge, closer to the end user.

“Edge internet is not an extension of the cloud, or a subset of 5G,” he explained. “Edge internet is a fundamental transformation of how computing is done. We are moving from centralized cloud to edge-enabled or edge-led architecture, and what that means is you start to deploy nodes closer to the user and on demand.”

This decentralized architecture also means moving away from a few cloud providers that dominate the cloud economy to a decentralized model with room for lot more players to make money, Sharma added. Mobile operators and service providers will play a key role in this new environment because their networking resources are a natural place for edge nodes.

“Edge is not only a new revenue opportunity for the mobile operator, but it is also necessary for managing data traffic,” he writes in the report. “In fact, without playing a role in the edge internet economy, mobile operators won’t be an effective player in the 5G ecosystem.”

The operators already own the cell sites, and they can rent their infrastructure to application and services developers as well as existing cloud players.

“Operators have a better chance of participating in the edge economy than they did in the cloud economy for an obvious reason: control and access over the real estate that they didn’t have in the cloud economy,” Sharma said. “But at the end of the day, somebody needs to abstract the complexity from operators.”

That’s where companies like AlefEdge come into play.

Earlier this summer the software company announced its edge strategy called the Manhattan Project. It uses the vendor’s Open5G Platform edge software stack that enables network operators and application providers to plug into the platform and deliver applications and services. The goal is to build an open edge ecosystem in partnership with application providers, carriers, and tower companies to integrate connectivity, applications, and APIs.

“How we can create these edge positions, one unit at a time, and start to repeat it? Just like operators are used to adding coverage several towers at a time, the edge can also be rolled out consistent with this philosophy,” said AlefEdge CEO Ganesh Sundaram. “Just like the cloud brought in a dimension of a programmable web philosophy through APIs, the expectation from the developer is a programmable edge.”