The Verizon 5G MEC (mobile edge computing) platform is now in 10 markets, with rollouts completed in Denver and Seattle. The company refers to the service as 5G Edge with AWS Wavelength, or simply 5G Edge.
Verizon 5G Edge was rolled out in Boston and the San Francisco Bay area in August. It also is available in Atlanta, Dallas, Las Vegas, Miami, New York City and Washington, DC.
The platform combines assets of Verizon and Amazon Web Services to bring computing capabilities to the edge of the network and closer to end users. This idea is to significantly reduce latency by cutting the time data needs to travel compared to legacy centralized topographies.
The press release about the Verizon 5G MEC markets featured two companies that are testing the service, including Harman and Inception XR.
Harman is using Verizon 5G MEC to support cellular vehicle-to-everything computing. The goal is to enable vehicles to communicate with multiple devices whether standing still or moving. Verizon 5G Edge is supporting the cell phone base station technology that connects vehicles and infrastructure.
Edge computing is a good fit for the automotive industry, according to Harman. “The combination of 5G and C-V2X edge computing not only can offer increased vehicular safety by informing drivers of road work restrictions, speed limit warnings and forward collision warnings, but also gives consumers unprecedented access to their favorite content faster than ever before,” Ram Iyer, Harman’s Senior Director of Telematics Engineering, said in the press release about Verizon 5G MEC.
Inception XR provides extended reality apps. It is testing Verizon 5G Edge and AWS Wavelength to better understand how increased bandwidth and lower latency can improve its products.
Verizon is paying attention to automotive use cases for 5G and MEC. In addition to the testing with Harman, the company has announced that it is exploring various vehicle-based services with Renovo (to support safety features such as real-time alerts for vehicles in the vicinity of an emergency event), Savari (driver and pedestrian warnings) and LG (information sharing between vehicles, mobile devices and transportation infrastructures).
