5G will be truly financially successful for operators only if there’s more money collected from its deployment than was collected before it. Would users pay more for what’s likely to look like the same wireless they’ve had? Probably not many would, so 5G depends on finding applications that exploit its more subtle differences. The 5G supporters have so far lagged in getting these applications going, and now a new player—Google—wants to step in.
Back in March, Google announced a 5G cloud strategy that was less an attempt to host 5G features than to promote 5G-specific applications. Called the Global Mobile Edge Cloud (GMEC), the concept wasn’t as much to eliminate operator-owned “carrier cloud” deployments as to supplement them. Many 5G operators (and most larger ones) have service areas that are larger than the geography where they’d likely have real estate to use for their own edge hosting.
Google’s approach then was clearly aimed at driving “generalized” application hosting at the edge, especially in the AI/ML area. A partnership with AT&T on that effort was announced at the same time, and it was interesting from the first because it didn’t commit Google to hosting 5G, as Microsoft has elected to do with Azure. Google also announced a specialized Anthos for Telecom offering to manage distributed edge resources as cloud components.
On December 8th, Google expanded this early initiative with an announcement they were bringing 200 applications from 30 partners to the edge using Anthos for Telecom. According to the Google blog just referenced, the target is “Organizations with edge presences—like retailers operating brick-and-mortar stores, transportation companies managing fleets of vehicles, or manufacturers relying on IoT-enabled equipment on shop floors.” In other words, IoT applications that are distributed to the point where it’s possible (or even likely) that companies couldn’t support their own edge hosting at a reasonable cost.
One model that I think Google wants to support would still include local controllers in the form of “Raspberry Pi” type resources, such as you’d likely find in “industrial IoT”. The target need would processing at a slightly deeper point that would require deployment of actual IT elements, including servers or even server farms. In other cases, such as in transportation applications, there may not be any local controller at all.
The specific application examples Google offers include rich visual experiences at retail locations, AI-based inspection in industrial applications, content delivery (CDN), and retail (shopping, supply chain, video surveillance, and shelf management). There’s also a good supply of “horizontal” applications in security, monitoring, etc.
There’s reasonable breadth in the early applications, and the total number isn’t overwhelming. Operators can pick from the list to create a 5G application set, and then focus on the prospects who fit the application profiles. It looks to me like the primary value in terms of introducing 5G applications will be the vertically targeted ones; there’s good referential value within a vertical that sales organizations can support, and the horizontal applications are a good way to add some additional meat to the deals.
The fact that Google is basing this on Anthos for Telecom means that it’s designed to support container-and-Kubernetes deployments, including Istio service mesh, and could be hosted on premises if needed. There’s no specific commitment to that model in the material, but I suspect that all these partners would be willing to offer operators direct hosting of their products on carrier cloud, if needed. Anthos for Telecom would allow hybrid GMEC operation, given that Anthos is a federated-cloud-and-edge model.
This possible dualism between Google’s cloud and carrier cloud is good, because many operators are concerned about a lock-in relationship with public cloud providers, as they are with equipment vendors. It’s also good that there’s probably not a huge amount of work involved in hybridizing between the two hosting environments, though if Google wants to promote this value proposition, they’ll need to be more explicit in how a customer would manage the transition.
Obviously, the big advantage of GMEC is that it offers a low-first-cost on-ramp to 5G applications, so operators could test the waters and validate an opportunity, grow with customer interest within GMEC, and (probably) migrate to a hybrid model when they have enough business to deploy their own carrier cloud infrastructure. GMEC would likely stay in place where operators had customer needs but not sufficient to justify their own infrastructure. Out of their primary region/country, perhaps?
Another advantage of GMEC is that Google is taking care of the integration/onboarding issues, the very issues that have proved so troublesome in NFV. That, combined with my first point, means operators could expect to be live with 5G application offerings very quickly if they adopted the GMEC model, compared to months (and sometimes failed attempts) for the NFV stuff.
Enterprises may be a recipient of the third GMEC advantage, even though “Anthos for Telecom” seems to aim at service providers. Some enterprises with far-flung IoT assets have seriously considered carrier 5G and edge computing, while those with more contained geographies are looking at rolling their own 5G. Many of Google’s applications, which target enterprise services, are obviously a fit for enterprises who want private 5G, and this group could benefit from using GMEC directly. For these, though, the question will be whether they need a hosted 5G service set as well as applications.
The final advantage is that Google seems to be taking care not to cross into what operators tend to regard as their personal space, the hosting of actual 5G service elements. While you could obviously elect to host 5G Open RAN or Core on GMEC, Google isn’t pushing an integrated model on every operator. That’s likely smart because while smaller operators do tend to like a one-stop-shop approach for 5G and applications, the bigger ones are reluctant to commit to public cloud hosting in perpetuity.
I’ve mentioned in prior blogs that operators have viewed Google as less threatening to their own business model than either Amazon or Microsoft, and it may be that Google is taking special pains to ensure that doesn’t change as things focus on 5G. They understand perhaps that operators pursued a relationship with Google over 12 years ago, and Google ignored it. They may feel that they have to do something to build back operator trust, though none of my operator contacts remember the earlier, failed, initiative.
Of course, the big question is whether the GMEC initiative will work. I remember all the hoopla around virtual network function commitments in the early days of NFV, and most of them came to nothing. The availability of applications isn’t a guarantee that any of them can make a business case for enough operators to be worthwhile, and that if some do, there will be growing momentum on 5G applications. Victory doesn’t come just by waving a flag and yelling “Charge!”
It’s also true that while application commitments in GMEC form aren’t a sufficient condition for 5G success, some sort of applications in some exploitable, tactical, form are surely a necessary condition. We’ve been postulating all manner of 5G revolutions around completely hypothetical missions, things we can name but not deploy. Google is frankly an ironic player to be jumping out to lead the charge for 5G applications (network equipment vendors in the space, or the operators, would be more logical), but the absence of a strategy from others has given Google an opening. Maybe it’s given the 5G space a lifeline, too.