Light Reading raised an interesting point on MEC (Mobile Edge Computing) in a story today; several, in fact. Along the way, they’re raising some interesting points about 5G, virtualization, and even NFV. It should be clear to many that 5G has become a kind of perceptual on-ramp for a bunch of new technologies, and we need to understand why that is and whether it’s justified.
The big problem with transformation for network operators is the scope of the activity. If you dabble with replacing a box here and there, or do things a bit differently in one emerging new service area, you’re not transforming as much as evolving. It might take years for new technologies introduced that way to build enough mass to change the service or cost picture noticeably. But if you really transform, you face an enormous initial cost (“first cost” in carrier terminology) and a comparably enormous risk. What everyone realized years ago (and what I blogged on then) was the fact that 5G had the advantage of being budgeted. What could be made to ride along for 5G would be budgeted too, and that might make the difference between it happening and it dying the death of ATM and frame relay.
The focus of the article is the hype around MEC and its association with 5G, and to start with we need to somewhat-separate these two issues. All modern technology is hyped, overhyped, and overhyped beyond possible realization. That’s the nature of click-bait journalism these days. “Man Bites Dog!” has always been a more exciting, novel, and interest-generating story than the opposite. Thus, MEC would have been hyped, and in fact was in the form of “edge computing”, 5G or not. Where there is a symbiosis between the concepts is that 5G budget. If you’re going to hitch your wagon to a star, pick one that’s not falling at a couple thousand miles per second.
One of the first points the article makes is that MEC would require 5G deployments to rearchitect services away from voice. That’s true, but it’s been happening all along, and it’s not really the problem in any event. The issue with MEC and operator 5G deployment is the same as the issue between any new technology and any deployment thereof—you have to justify it. The article quotes a speaker at the LR 5G event as saying that a transformation of architecture is like turning an aircraft carrier in the mud. What gives it that inertia is the fact that we design networks to be built on device principles not on virtual principles.
Most of the elements of mobile infrastructure are the way they are because of mobility, not voice. Arguably the most complex aspect of mobile infrastructure today is the Evolved Packet Core (EPC), which is responsible for keeping mobile users connected as they move through various cells. The design for EPC was done when there was no virtualization, no SDN. If we were to address the problem of mobility today, I’m pretty confident we wouldn’t address it with anything that resembled EPC, but we did EPC and it’s now a massive sunk cost.
The article also notes that Open RAN (ORAN) for 5G has been a slog, and obviously MEC would be even more difficult to push standards on. True again, but ORAN was the obvious place for 5G focus for the simple reason that 5G benefits to customers are almost totally derived from the 5G New Radio (NR). That’s why we had this cryptic concept of “Non-Stand-Alone” or NSA as a pre-specification for 5G. 5G NSA is 5G NR without the rest of 5G, which admits the basic truth that what 5G really provides is higher customer bandwidth, higher cell bandwidth, and lower latency. Anything beyond that is speculative, a benefit not of 5G but of what might be enabled by 5G.
That speculation is how we got to MEC in the first place. Remember that one of our 5G benefits is latency. Well, it makes little sense to minimize transit delay in the radio network if you’re going to haul the traffic a thousand miles through a half-dozen hops to get to where it’s going. MEC is thus a way of making 5G low-latency connectivity meaningful, but not necessarily justified. We still need applications that can monetize low-latency processing to justify hosting near the edge. We know that gaming or augmented reality might do that, and so what we should be looking at for MEC’s business justification is the revenue potential for those two technologies and the totality of the infrastructure and features needed to make them real.
But there’s another path we could take here. Even virtual networks have to get real eventually. Virtualization of networking substitutes agile, generalized, hosting and software resources for purpose-built and fixed-in-place service devices. You still need hosts, you still need generalized transport (optical, Level 2/Ethernet in data centers), and so you’re not virtualizing everything, just (really) the services. The physical reality of what’s under virtualization has its own set of requirements.
One example is access networks. If you have fiber to the home (FTTH), to the node (FTTN), or even copper loop, they have to go somewhere. If you backhaul wireless cells, you’re backhauling them to somewhere. In most cases, the “somewhere” is either a telco edge office (called a “central office” or CO), of which there are about 12 thousand in the US. The physical media goes there, which means that if you’re going to provide something to the connected customers, that’s the first place where significant service intelligence could be hosted.
We’re not going to have hundreds of thousands of micro-edge data centers. The limitations are based on a combination of media topology and real estate cost and ownership. My model, for example, has never suggested that global carrier cloud would generate more than about 100,000 incremental data centers worldwide by 2030. Most of these (88%) would qualify as “edge” in that they’d be located at the terminus of edge aggregation media connections. That’s short of the drama of MEC we often hear, but remember that click-bait technology has no cost, no inertia, to contend with. Bulls**t, I tell my clients, has no inertia.
The real question here, in my view, is whether 5G has any justification beyond the NR/NSA form. Will 5G core, network slicing, NFV VNFs for all the pieces, really go anywhere at all? That’s a question that the article asks implicitly, but there’s no answer to that question. 5G itself, 5G in the standards sense, is the classic field of dreams. Telco has been a supply-side world for ages, and the real inertia in 5G isn’t voice but the notion that if you build a new service it will succeed automatically. The OTTs have been thriving because the telcos have built connectivity without purpose, leaving others to provide the purpose and gain the revenue.
We shouldn’t forget a final point about the click-bait hype age we’re in. Once you’ve hyped, overhyped, and hyped-beyond-all-recognition, you can’t get any further on the positive side of a technology so you have to turn on it. What was once salvation is now a contemptable fraud. The people quoted in the article were primarily representing companies would be hurt by MEC and carrier cloud, so it’s not surprising they’d be totally negative, as it wasn’t surprising early 5G and MEC coverage was totally positive.
How things get covered isn’t the issue here. How they get built is, and we still have some work to do putting the pieces of 5G’s puzzle into a business case picture. Till we’ve done that, we won’t know anything about what the future really holds.