DENVER – The edge is a word that has taken on a meaning of its own, Verizon SVP of 5G Debika Bhattacharya said during a panel at this week’s ConnectX event in Denver.

"The way we think about edge — and this also seems to be the general sort of industry definition of the term — is people have your cloud services moving closer to the source of data," Bhattacharya said.

But the edge is different from just having a server or a data center handling compute and storage. Edge really means putting "the cloud service providers into your back pocket, so to speak," she explained, citing Verizon's partnerships with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Provider (GCP).

"The difference between just having computer servers locally is you have cloud services and all the benefits you get from cloud services," Bhattacharya said.

She touted, for instance, Verizon's public mobile edge computing (MEC) where compute and storage "is in our wireless network." The operator currently has 17 public MEC sites, with two more planned for the near future.

Public MEC is an attractive service for the gaming and retail industries because they have use cases and applications that require low latency. And these customers, especially retail, often don't have the footprint to store compute within their physical locations. "They use the closest Verizon public MEC site to do fast processing, so that's why there's a lot of interest there," Bhattacharya explained.

Verizon has also "seen tremendous uptake in private MEC for a few reasons," she said.

The first is lower latency provided by private MEC services. This takes into account not just the physics of the round trip that data makes to a public MEC, but also the processing time. "All of that is maybe done within just a few milliseconds in a private environment," she explained.

The second area Verizon has seen an increase in private MEC is manufacturing because of security concerns — manufacturers' business process is their IP, Bhattacharya said. "They want to process their data locally and not have it go out into public network."

Data security and localization, lower latency, and being able to process data "within your site from an economic standpoint or using your wide area connectivity to send it up to the cloud" are all factors that have contributed to increased private and public MEC adoption, she explained.