Verizon says that Las Vegas is the eighth city for Verizon 5G Edge with AWS Wavelength. The offering leverages the edge computing partnership announced last year that pairs the carrier’s 5G mobile edge computing (MEC) technology and Amazon’s AWS Wavelength.
Verizon 5G Edge with AWS Wavelength already is active in Atlanta; the San Francisco Bay area; Boston; Dallas; Miami; New York and Washington, DC. Two more announcements are expected by year’s end, Verizon says.
The rationale for the Verizon 5G Edge partnership and the broader word of MEC is simple: Attractive and creative mobile applications are being developed that are predicated on the availability of high levels of responsiveness and low levels of latency. The only way to fill this requirement is to bring key computing, storage and analytics capabilities closer to the end user.
The partnership was announced on December 3, 2019. The next week, Verizon Chairman and CEO Hans Vestberg said that edge computing would generate “meaningful” revenues this year.
In addition to describing the partnership as a way in which the public cloud will use MEC, Vestberg said that Verizon sees opportunities for MEC-based private cloud services for major enterprises. He said that discussions already had been held and cited manufacturing, retail and health care sectors as likely early adopters.
Verizon announced deployments in Dallas and Miami earlier this month. At that time, it offered examples of services of which MEC is capable. These include leveraging analytics to estimate wait times for various services at venues, provisioning of near-real time safety information to vehicles and data sharing between vehicles, mobile devices and transportation infrastructures.
“We already have customers today creating exciting new applications in industries ranging from healthcare to sports and we can’t wait to see the next game-changing app that will be built on 5G and MEC,” Verizon Business CEO Tami Erwin said in the press release announcing the Las Vegas rollout of Verizon 5G Edge with AWS Wavelength.
