Verizon 5G Edge paired with Amazon Web Services’ (AWS’) Wavelength edge compute service is now live for developers in Boston and the San Francisco Bay Area.

The wide-ranging partnership, which was announced in December following 18 months of work behind the scenes, will lead to edge compute availability in 10 markets by the end of the year, Thierry Sender, the lead for edge compute and managed services at Verizon, told SDxCentral in a phone interview. 

The operator previously suggested that Verizon Edge would achieve nationwide commercial availability this year, but Sender clarified that as an interpretation based on the geographic reach of 10 major U.S. markets. “The reality is once we get to these 10 markets … I would say that a vast majority of the U.S. footprint will be able to benefit from Wavelength services,” he said.

The deployments in Boston and the Bay Area cover the metropolitan area and greater region surrounding those markets, but “obviously after you begin to go out after a certain point the latency benefits begin to diminish,” Sender explained. 

Verizon Edge Claims 20-50 Millisecond Latency

Verizon is telling developers and enterprise customers to expect latency between 20 and 50 milliseconds, but “we’ve seen in many instances numbers better than that,” Sender said. 

Verizon and AWS declined to go into detail about where equipment has been deployed to achieve this first commercial deployment of Wavelength on a commercial mobile network, but the work involved is “not a minor undertaking,” according to Sender.

Verizon Edge requires the deployment of new hardware at hub locations throughout Verizon’s network, but that equipment is “not required at every 5G radio node or access location,” Bill Stone, VP of technology development and planning, told SDxCentral when the deal was announced late last year.

Moreover, while 5G dramatically improves the capabilities and performance of Verizon Edge, it’s not a requirement, Sender explained. “The way we architected this would benefit any endpoint on the Verizon wireless network, so even 4G devices … will see a tremendous benefit from moving workloads and any cloud resources out to the edge in the markets that we launched.”

However, he added, “when you think about the use cases that are covered and the mission-critical aspects of what businesses are really talking to us about, it’s really the transformative experiences that can only be really captured with the combination of 5G with Wavelength, so where you get the high performance characteristics of 5G, the speed, the density, the rapid deployment aspects, and of course the latency.”

Edge Deployments Not Reliant on 5G Footprint

Verizon’s evolution to a 5G network is driven by a desire to transform the network to achieve more “virtualization, more SDN-type functionality, more abilities for us to dynamically provision capabilities, and that’s true not just at the node but across our entire network,” Sender said. 

“All that network densification, flexibility in terms of configuration, advanced platforms, is all tied to the 5G story, and that’s what, quite frankly, is the enablement of our ability to architect this solution where we can deploy AWS capabilities anywhere within our network,” he added. 

It’s an important distinction because while Verizon Edge is available in the Bay Area, for example, the experience will differ based on each user’s physical location and proximity to Verizon’s 5G network and Wavelength deployments. The operator today named San Jose, California, as the 36th U.S. city to gain access to Verizon’s 5G network riding on millimeter-wave (mmWave) spectrum, but other large cities that comprise the region, including San Francisco and Oakland, haven’t hit 5G availability on Verizon’s network yet. 

The operator maintains it will reach nationwide 5G coverage before the end of 2020, but that goal, which is heavily dependent on its ability to use dynamic spectrum sharing (DSS), places it last among the large domestic carriers. 

T-Mobile US activated its nationwide 5G network running on low-band spectrum in December 2019, and AT&T last month said its low-band 5G network reached nationwide availability. Nationwide footprint claims are hazy because operators generally leave out substantial portions of the population. AT&T’s 5G network covers 205 million people, about 62% of the U.S. population, and T-Mobile’s 5G network covers nearly 250 million people, or about 76% of the country’s total population.