The European Telecommunication Standards Institute (ETSI) changed the name of its Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) Industry Specification Group (ISG) to Multi-access Edge Computing to better reflect the challenges and requirements that non-cellular operators face.

The focus of the group is being expanded to deal with multiple MEC hosts being deployed in multiple networks, owned by various operators that are running edge applications collaboratively. This reflects the group's desire to not limit itself to mobile and to offer support for both wired and wireless technologies.

The ETSI MEC group isn't the only one to quickly realize that it's smarter to refer to "edge computing" rather than the more limiting term "mobile edge computing."

The MEC group will look at networks that connect multiple types of devices over different types of access technologies such as LTE, 5G, fixed, and WiFi.

The MEC system will provide a standardized and open system able to support different virtualization techniques, with the capability for an application to discover apps and services available on other hosts. The current work includes standard application programming interfaces (APIs), standards-based interfaces, and an alignment with network functions virtualization (NFV) architecture.

ETSI’s MEC also announced some new members to its leadership team. Alex Reznik, a solutions architect with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) was elected as the group’s new chairman. Additionally, Pekke Kuur from Nokia and Sami Kekki from Huawei were both elected as new vice chairs.