A conversation about edge computing with John Reister, Vice President of Marketing and Product Management, Vasona Networks
The below is only a summary. Download a transcript of the complete interview and access the complete report “Power at the Edge: Processing and storage move from the central core to the network edge”.
MEC and other edge computing initiatives call our attention to the relevance of location of network functions in determining performance and, even more crucially, QoE. Vasona Networks had started to move traffic optimization closer to the edge before MEC work at ETSI started. In this conversation with John Reister, Vice President of Marketing and Product Management at Vasona, we talked about the evolution of moving functions toward the edge – and about where the edge is.
“Edge computing enables operators to achieve a higher degree of flexibility in their networks. That gives them a lot more agility in how quickly they can introduce services.” New technologies in the core or data center “can be easily copied by anybody on the internet. Whereas when you do things at the network edge, it’s a more sustainable differentiation, a unique capability that adds value for your mobile customers,” John said.
A differentiator for Vasona, is that their use an aggregation point as the edge. John told us “By being located at an aggregation point, like we are, where we’re dealing with several hundred cell sites, the vast majority of handovers we see are between cells and between cell sectors that are covered under the same MEC instance.”
At the same time, it is advantageous for operators to manage traffic at the application level according to John: this approach allows operators to “manage down the latency for those time-sensitive services where the user is directly interacting with the network.”
This topic was discussed further on a recent webinar. Download the webinar.
