Verizon today extended its mobile edge compute offering to Google Cloud, making it the only U.S. carrier with edge services slated to ride on all three of the world’s largest hyperscalers. 

By pairing Verizon 5G Edge with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and now Google Cloud, the mobile network operator hopes to carve out an early and meaningful lead in delivering the nascent technology. 

“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 in a phone interview.

Verizon Claims First-Mover Advantage

Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg recently claimed the operator created the mobile edge computing (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 and 16 months since the first U.S. markets powered by AWS’ Wavelength edge compute service were activated.

Throughout 2021, the operator expanded its edge strategy to include public and private variants of MEC. Verizon forked its edge service for private networks running on Microsoft Azure, and shared plans to eventually target a public edge for consumers and private edge for enterprises on AWS.

The private variant with Microsoft and public option with AWS are both commercially available today. 

Google Cloud Spans Private, Public Edge

The addition of Google Cloud pushes Verizon further down this path wherein it plans to provide both public and private MEC services with all three of the cloud giants. 

“I would certainly expect that as we figure out what the customer demand is, we’ll have the flexibility to meet that with a partner of choice,” Koeppe said.

“When you’re facing your consumer or your enterprise use cases, there’s just a need for flexibility there. So being able to partner with all three would certainly make a lot of sense, but we’ll let the consumer and enterprise demand dictate what comes next in that equation,” he added.

Google is already tapped for both scenarios, first by combining Verizon’s on-premises and private 5G edge services with Google Distributed Cloud Edge. 

The Google platform, revealed in October 2021, allows operators to run radio access network (RAN) functions and core network elements at the edge, providing enterprise customers high-speed bandwidth with private 5G and localized compute, Sachin Gupta, VP and GM of Google Cloud open infrastructure, explained during a media briefing at the time. 

Ericsson Pilots Verizon-Google Edge at US Factory

Verizon also said it’s working with Ericsson to pilot the operator’s 5G edge service with Google Distributed Cloud Edge at its 5G equipment factory in Texas. After the factory came online in March 2020, Ericsson delivered its first U.S.-made commercial 5G base station to Verizon in July 2020.

The RAN vendor intends to test the service, which is built on Ericsson’s 5G Private Network technology, with autonomous mobile robots for package scanning and inventory management. 

“It’s no secret that this is a very hot technology in the context of 5G,” Koeppe said. “We’ve already seen demand and are meeting it for private MEC solutions for enterprise. So this window here is relatively short.”

The operator 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.

Blended Strategy Begets Fuller Opportunities

The carrier’s blended approach to MEC allows it and customers to develop and realize additional use cases over time, according to Koeppe. This strategy extends to the various clouds it’s fusing MEC to and making available to customers with widely different requirements. 

“This is a capability that we drove within the industry and then drew the partners into,” Koeppe said, adding that “this is the mechanism by which you deliver low-latency solutions,” a main feature of 5G.

“Right now the technology is so new that it’s a little early to rate and rank” the different cloud providers on MEC, he said. 

The extent to which Amazon, Microsoft, and Google differentiate in this space remains to be seen, Koeppe said. “But we’re going to continue driving the use cases that rely upon that architecture, and make sure that we’re tying our 5G programs to that type of capability.”