Verizon’s mobile edge computing (MEC) service with Amazon Web Services (AWS) now reaches Los Angeles, Detroit, Minneapolis, and Charlotte, North Carolina making for a total of 17 metropolitan areas since its August 2020 launch.

Verizon 5G Edge with AWS Wavelength marries the operator’s 5G network with Amazon’s edge compute service with the aid of AWS Outposts, which effectively create a Wavelength zone running as an abstraction layer for developers. 

The operator declined to say how many customers are using the AWS equipped public edge variant for consumer applications, and said it will continue expanding to more markets throughout 2022.

Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg recently claimed the operator created the MEC market and has a two-year head start in the space due to its early moves. Indeed, it’s been two years since Verizon announced its first MEC service with AWS for public use cases.

“We’re still the only one in the market that has commercial offerings both on private and public,” Vestberg boasted at Goldman Sach’s Communacopia conference.

Verizon last month said its MEC service will soon be available in public and private form with all three of the world’s largest hyperscalers — AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. The private variant with Microsoft and public option with AWS are both commercially available today.

“There’s a first-mover advantage to this and obviously when you start to create these relationships in this infrastructure, the rest of the ecosystem tends to pay a lot of attention,” Adam Koeppe, SVP of network technology and planning at Verizon, said last month in a phone interview.

Public 5G edge use cases generally fall into five categories: artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning for inference at the edge; edge video acceleration; mixed reality; game streaming; and automotive, according to Manish Nasta, Verizon’s head of commercial MEC.

The operator highlighted customers that are using Verizon 5G Edge with AWS Wavelength for drones, energy management applications, and software-as-a-service providers.

Verizon claims the total addressable market for private edge compute will reach $1 billion by the end of 2022, and up to $10 billion by 2025. The MEC market opens up an additional $12 billion market opportunity around applications and services, including partnerships it has struck for private MEC services with IBM for IoT, Deloitte for retailers, Cisco, SAP, and others, according to Verizon.