ZTE and China Mobile say they have activated mobile edge computing (MEC) to enable end-to-end network slicing services on the operator’s nascent 5G network in a coastal South China province. China’s top mobile operator and its competitors — China Unicom and China Telecom — launched the world’s largest 5G network earlier this month.

The networks were originally expected to be riding on standalone 5G new radio (NR) cores, but that goal failed to materialize. A standalone 5G NR core, which many early 5G operators plan to deploy next year, will provide benefits for low latency, edge computing, and other 5G-tailored services like networking slicing.

ZTE and China Mobile haven’t provided any updates on that effort, but the companies claim the provisioning of network slicing has been accomplished nonetheless on the operator’s existing non-standalone framework riding on a 4G LTE core.

The network equipment vendor and operator deployed the MEC capabilities and network slicing in the Guangdong province, which has a population of almost 115 million people. ZTE claims the new architecture will also enable China Mobile to offer artificial intelligence video rendering, high-performance route distribution in accordance with Layer 3 to Layer 7 protocols, and acceleration in hardware and software.

China Mobile and ZTE plan to further explore the technologies and develop services for cloud gaming, video, autonomous driving, content delivery, and logistics. The companies claim the system also supports flexible procurement, and advanced services for network management and edge computing.

China’s top three operators have deployed roughly 86,000 5G base stations and expect to have more than 130,000 live before the end of the year. China Unicom and China Telecom are pooling resources to jointly build and manage a 5G radio access network (RAN) to cut costs and share spectrum, but each operator will build and manage its respective 5G mobile core.

“5G is about services, network agility, and new business cases, and all three of those are coming in the future for the most part,” Chris Nicoll, principal analyst at ACG Research, told SDxCentral earlier this month. “Broad deployment of 5G is needed to accelerate many business cases, but it needs to include broad deployment of Standalone 5G, MEC, and devices to really change the game. It’s coming, but not in 2019 and probably not really until late 2020.”

ZTE says it has inked 35 commercial 5G contracts with network operators in Europe, Asia Pacific, the Middle East, and Africa.