The telco hopes to spur local MEC innovation in partnership with Kyndryl and Amazon
Vodafone this week announced the opening of its Edge Innovation Lab in Salford, England. The company is collaborating with Kyndryl and Amazon Web Services (AWS) to operate the new lab, which will showcase Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) technology, as well as Mixed Reality (MR) and visual inspection services.
Vodafone picked MediaCityUK as the location, a 200-acre mixed-use property that also houses BBC and ITV offices. The Edge Innovation Lab itself is located at MediaCityUK’s Home of Skills and Technology (HOST), an incubator for high-tech development that features business support services, networking, technology training and social spaces for connecting and collaborating.
Vodafone claims the Edge Innovation Lab is the first of its kind in the U.K. The company said it hopes the lab will foster the development of new MEC-related apps and services in the surrounding Greater Manchester area near where the lab is located.
“Software developers and innovators in the Greater Manchester region will have access to these technologies in the earliest stages of development. This head start will create a global centre of excellence for real-time mobile applications in the region, supporting the growth of digitally-led businesses and industries in the area, as well as in the rest of the UK,” said Vodafone.
Vodafone struck a partnership with IT infrastructure services provider Kyndryl to offer Edge Innovation Lab customers professional and managed services for MEC. What’s more, Vodafone has deployed dedicated MEC servers on premises at the Edge Innovation Lab itself, and has also launched a distributed MEC zone in Manchester with AWS — an extension of AWS’s Wavelength Zone infrastructure.
“We expect edge technologies to increasingly become an enabler of business outcomes; allowing end users (and machines) and industries including manufacturing, energy and retail, to reap the benefits of traditional cloud computing while gaining advantages such as reduced data latency, better data autonomy and enhanced security,” said Tosca Colangeli, Kyndryl President UK&I.
Vodafone noted that the Edge Innovation Lab’s opening has been timed concurrently with the rollout of its new Edge Innovation Program 2.0.
“Using both dedicated and distributed MEC technologies, the Edge Innovation Programme 2.0 will inspire the creation of innovative and futuristic services, products and applications. Participants of the trial will be able to ‘try before you buy’ MEC services and will also receive a voucher for further discounts on additional services following trials and proof-of-concepts, as well as work alongside Vodafone network and technology experts to bring ideas to life,” said the company.
Vodafone counts 20 partners thus far that it has worked with to trial new MEC services, including autonomous vehicle developer Aurrigo, Sportable — which develops IoT solutions for sports — biometric authentication service Keyless, and tech research firm InterDigital, which is working on MEC solutions for manufacturing and Industry 4.0.
While the Edge Innovation Lab is the first of its kind for Vodafone, the company is also leveraging U.K. facilities to further its Open RAN ambitions. Vodafone launched an Open RAN test and validation laboratory at its Newbury, England campus in 2021. Last month Vodafone announced an O-RAN partnership with NTT DoCoMo which the two companies will use to harmonize system integration and test processes including testing criteria and experiences to create common test scripts.
