LAS VEGAS – Verizon Edge, which marries the operator’s 5G network with Amazon Web Services' (AWS’) Wavelength edge compute service, brings the computing platform much closer to the 5G network and, more specifically, much closer to the user, said Bill Stone, Verizon’s VP of technology development and planning.

“When a customer accesses an AWS cloud service today, the response time, or the latency, is relatively high because you have to traverse not only the 5G network but also the core network to ultimately get to the cloud,” he told SDxCentral in a phone interview. “Now when we bring the edge all the way down into the 5G [Ultra Wideband] network or right at the very edge of that, we greatly reduce the response time and get down to single-digit response times."

The partnership, announced at AWS re:Invent, will deliver a service or capability for developers to innovate upon and provide new services to customers. “We’ve been engaged in quiet or stealth mode with AWS the past 18 months,” Stone said.

Developers that take advantage of the offering will be able to make these new applications available on the Verizon Edge platform and target those services to whatever customer base they desire, Stone explained. “The ecosystem of developers that [AWS] already have using their cloud platform, now with the AWS portal being used to access the Verizon Edge platform, we’re essentially opening up to the development community the ability to develop new transformative applications that can take advantage of the low latency … and high data throughput capabilities” of Verizon’s 5G network, he said.

Those customers won’t require a specific relationship with both parties to take advantage of the offering, but they will have to be a Verizon customer. “We have flexibility there to structure it in whatever is appropriate for the specific application or service capability that is being enabled through Verizon Edge and AWS Wavelength," Stone noted.

Details beyond that, including specific services and how they might be sold or packaged, are still being worked out, according to Stone.

In the meantime, Stone and his team have some work to accomplish before Verizon Edge reaches nationwide commercial availability in 2020. New hardware will have to be deployed at hub locations throughout Verizon’s network, but that equipment is “not required at every 5G radio node or access location,” he said.

“The hub locations are the logical places for the platform so a single platform gets access to many 5G nodes and provides a capability to different sized geographic areas," Stone said. "The further down we deploy, the lower the latency, but any of these locations within these hubbing locations enable us to achieve much lower latency than you would achieve” by having data traverse back to an AWS cloud instantiation in the network today.

Verizon and AWS are currently piloting the technology with some customers in Chicago, but expansion efforts are already underway.

“Currently the plan is to maintain linkage with the availability of our 5G network," Stone said. "We’ll be releasing more details as we go into next year about the exact availability. As we continue to expand our 5G UWB deployment this will be following along either in sync with it or very close behind it.”

Deploying the edge compute capabilities will also require some changes in software, but Stone described that as a relatively easy effort because of the work Verizon has already accomplished in network virtualization. “We’ve already been going through a process of virtualizing our network functions so our network functions are instantiated in software on the Verizon cloud platform. The change that’s required is we have to move some of those network functions around,” he explained.

“Essentially we just reconfigure the network by instantiating network functions closer to the edge of the network to enable us to break out the user-plane data that’s then feeding directly into the Verizon Edge platform. It’s just a software reconfiguration change,” Stone said.

The combination of AWS’ developer community, lower latency in a 5G air interface, higher bandwidth, and network capacity is what makes this partnership with AWS unique, he said. “It’s really a differentiated offering that has never been done before. We’re the first in the world to do something like this — this combination of AWS and Verizon.”

That claimed differentiation is likely detail specific as the partnership appears similar to one between Verizon rival AT&T and AWS rival Microsoft. Those two firms late last month began a limited roll out of network edge compute (NEC) technology that ties together Microsoft’s Azure cloud and AT&T’s network edge locations.

The combo will allow AT&T’s software-defined and virtualized 5G core that make up its Network Cloud platform to support Azure services closer to customers. The two companies had previously stated that NEC testing showed a 40% to 50% network performance improvement compared to testing in the public cloud, and speed tests showed 24 to 40 milliseconds of latency.