Verizon activated its private, on-premise mobile edge compute (MEC) service with Microsoft Azure, broadening its 5G edge footprint to target factories, warehouses, logistics facilities, and ports.

The managed services offering integrates Verizon 5G Edge with Microsoft Azure Stack Edge and layers in additional features, depending on enterprise requirements. These include Verizon’s ThingSpace IoT platform, data and video ingestion services, and network security, explained Matt Threefoot, associate director at Verizon.

The commercial availability comes five months after Verizon announced plans to expand its 5G MEC offering with Amazon Web Services (AWS), making that framework available as a public edge for consumers and private edge for enterprises. The AWS variant for private networks isn’t commercially available yet.

By positioning its private 5G network service, On Site 5G, on AWS or Azure, Verizon allows enterprises to choose a preferred cloud provider and weigh that against features that best fit application requirements. 

Differences between current AWS Outpost infrastructure and Microsoft Azure Stack Edge are notable. “The Azure Stack Edge can scale all the way down to a single rack unit server and then you can cluster together multiple servers. … As much as AWS has announced the single-rack unit and two-rack units options, I don’t think that’s generally available yet. Right now it’s still the 42-rack unit,” Threefoot explained.

The smaller equipment footprint provided by Microsoft allows for easier remote management, he added. “We know a lot of these factories, a lot of these warehouses, distribution centers are in more remote locations where they might have thousands of employees [and] their IT staff to support it is usually pretty small.”

Verizon could also expand its use of Microsoft Azure to make its 5G edge publicly available for consumer applications, adopting a hybrid approach similar to its planned dual use offering with AWS. “We do have a deep partnership with Microsoft and there’ll be more to come later,” Threefoot said.

Meanwhile, the private enterprise MEC front will eventually gain flexibility to address different user types, he added. Those include a completely closed device connection on a private network, and devices that can connect to Verizon’s public network and a private enterprise network. The completely closed environment is commercially available now.

The operator continues to showcase logistics company Ice Mobility as the first and only publicly acknowledged company using Verizon 5G Edge with Azure Stack Edge, but “there are more in the funnel,” Threefoot said. 

Verizon, acting as the primary managed service provider for the integrated offering, works with prospective customers by designing and developing the on-site environment to ensure connectivity and services for specific use cases, he said. Factors include radio frequency design for the facility, compute storage needs, the packet core, and licenses for additional services. 

“The customer buys it from us and then we will coordinate the delivery with whoever the radio manufacturers are, all the radio access network partners, Microsoft Azure Stack Edge equipment … get it all installed, tested, turned on, and hand it over,” he said. 

While a lot of emphasis has been placed on scale-down capabilities, the overall costs make on-site private networks less applicable to small facilities, according to Threefoot. As such, the initial private MEC push remains around manufacturing, warehouse automation, logistics facilities, ports, airports, and health care.

These are “places today that would have a distributed antenna system in the legacy world that might be looking to upgrade to a fully on-site, private network,” Threefoot explained.