Telco Edge Cloud

What is telco edge cloud?

The telco edge cloud is an initiative that promotes a federated solution in which applications and services are executed and processed at a location close to the end user.

Telco Edge Cloud allows service providers to provide high bandwidth at the edge as well as low latency services. Cloud services are running at the edge in a distributed manner by deploying the user or data plane at the edge site while maintaining the control plane in the core data center. Apart from that, workloads and software applications are deployed using a distributed architecture providing users faster speed and higher reliability, giving them better user experience because of the reduced latency.

Advantages of the Telco Edge Cloud

Enterprise Edge

What is the Enterprise Edge?

The enterprise edge contains all the network components for efficient and secure communication between the Central site, data center and remote locations, business partners, mobile users, and the Internet.

Enterprise edge computing addresses various issues existing in the enterprise IT world that cannot be addressed by the cloud. With the use of enterprise edge computing, latency can be reduced, and it can also minimize the data used. Edge computing helps IT retain its sensitive data on-premises and provides them with the elasticity, scalability, and other vital cloud functionality.

It allows for companies to be able to leverage and utilize specific edge use cases to optimize their performance and solve challenges at all the remote locations, managing them effectively through a single interface.

Advantages of the Enterprise Edge

Private Networks

Wireless networking in industrial and mission critical domains is a large untapped growth opportunity for smart connected systems. New communication standards for enterprise will create new opportunities to a host of previously infeasible applications, allowing for large, industrial-scale internet-of-things networks in factories, warehouses, ports, and more.

To enable this level of enterprise connectivity—and not just any connectivity, but ultra-reliable, high-speed, low-latency, power-efficient, high-density wireless connectivity—a company likely has two basic options. It can connect to a public LTE/5G network. Or it can opt for a private LTE/5G network, either by purchasing its own infrastructure while contracting for operational support from a mobile operator, or by building and maintaining its own network using its own spectrum. For many of the world’s largest businesses, private LTE & 5G will likely become the preferred choice, especially for industrial applications in sectors such as critical infrastructure, manufacturing plants, logistics centers, ports and terminals.

Architecture for Private Networks

Advantages of Private Networks

Enterprises have economically sensible use cases and a technologically justified need for private 5G or LTE technology on their premises. New digital use cases like predictive maintenance, AR/VR and smart robotics are increasingly used in day-to-day operations and bring tangible benefits on either or both the cost (productivity gains) or revenue (new customer propositions) sides, resulting in attractive business cases.

The benefits of Private Networks are creating interest in virtually every industry where organizations have large areas filled with lots of devices and applications that absolutely must be connected at all times — and where sensitive data must be gathered and then shared between devices and servers.

Vast areas with complex networking needs

In large spaces with extensive network requirements and hundreds of users and devices, Private Networks helps prevent the congestion likely with Wi-Fi and public cellular and is much less expensive to provision and maintain.

High-risk information

In some scenarios, highly sensitive information that is very valuable to hackers is unavoidable. Organizations such as hospitals can keep important information on-site via Private Networks, enabling additional layers of security unavailable through Wi-Fi.

High-bandwidth traffic within budgetary limitations

Organizations looking to connect many video surveillance cameras could use public cellular network, but data usage likely would be cost-prohibitive. Fixed-rate private cellular is a much more cost-effective option.

Remote locations lacking wireless infrastructure

In the middle of nowhere — in places where carriers have not set up wireless infrastructure — organizations can relatively easily set up a Wireless LAN via private cellular network.

Given the diversity and omnipresence of IoT and connectivity-dependent technologies, Private Cellular Network is becoming very applicable in most industries. The ability to set up a Wireless LAN that is much more high-performing, reliable, flexible, cost-effective, and secure than a Wi-Fi network meets the specific needs found in many use cases

5G in a box

The biggest challenge facing companies with multiple locations would be around managing connectivity to optimize operations. This seems perfectly valid, yet when the operations include very remote sites with limited traditional vectors of connectivity a solution needs to be found. Examples of challenging locations including Mining, Oil and Gas and Rural locations.

The solution here comes in the form of 5G, as this has the potential to provide sufficient bandwidth and connectivity to solve the issues customers might face. However, there is still an issue in how to package and procure this for the various edge sites. 5G consists of multiple components that can be problematic for companies to provide.

Advantages of 5G in a Box

 R As Nearby Computing provides a central management interface, all the various edge sites can be managed from a single pane of glass. This allows for ease of use for management and operations and reduces cost around support personnel.

R If any application use cases are required on site, they can be provisioned and monitored through the control plane, allowing scalability and leveraging of hardware onsite.

Satellite Edge Computing

One of the big challenges with rural and remote sites is around connectivity.

There are lots of very remote places without sufficient infrastructure to provide stable connectivity, and this includes areas without any mobile reception. This precludes relying on LTE or 5G.

A way to get around this is to relay on Satellite backhaul, with bandwidth provided by leveraging Satellite up and downlink. This however results in very high latency, that stops a lot of business-critical services from being viable for deployment.

Value of Nearby Computing

 R Failover from one Satellite connection to another to prevent saturation can be orchestrated by NearbyOne.

R MEC services can be provisioned at the termination of the Satellite downlink, allowing for low latency use cases to be leveraged.

Edge in a box

Everyone is jumping on the concept of Mobile Edge Computing. Interesting use cases here range from video analytics such as face mask detection and perimetral security to augmented reality that will allow workers to operate more efficiently. There are however still challenges that preclude most companies from leveraging these solutions to optimize their operations.

Firstly, there are some perceived ideas of having to process a lot of these use cases in the cloud. It is therefore a case of introducing potential customers to the power of the edge for their specific industry. There is also however the logistical exercise of providing everything to be able to run these use cases at the edge. As these use cases can be varied, it becomes daunting to provision and configure everything.

Advantages of Edge in a box

 R Due to a pre-defined hardware configuration, operational readiness is achieved faster as the pre-configured use cases can be implemented much faster.

R NearbyOne allows for easy orchestration of the required applications, and can even allow for scalability, giving organizations the ability to grow their environment and get more benefits from leveraging the technology.

Infrastructure at the Edge

With Edge Computing comes Edge sites, and the challenge on how to manage it effectively.

Edge infrastructure is not homogenous, including diverse technologies such as cameras, sensors as well as servers. Also complicated is the provisioning and installation of these sites, as it takes time and money, especially if customs get involved for cross border shipping.

Advantages of Nearby One Infrastructure Management Solution

 R Nearby One Infra provides easy KPI and operational Metrics, viewable either through the Nearby One interface or ported to any Management interface the client would require. Added to this is the ability to flag and action due to an extensive alert system.

R As the management is done through a single interface, this reduces cost as a centralized team can view and manage operations for a scalable network, ranging from a few sites to thousands.

Rural & Remote Connectivity

Edge Computing in rural areas aims to provide connectivity and tailored solutions and services by taking advantage of the available backhaul connectivity.

In this way, these services and applications are made available to the community in the far-flung rural locations and isolated areas. One way to do it is by leveraging mobile broadband solutions where fiber roll out is not feasible at household level. Deployment of private 5G is also viable in providing connectivity.

Edge Computing provides solutions to cater different segments in the rural areas such as Agriculture, where farm productivity can be achieved by farmers in terms of harvesting and inventory management among others. It can also be applied to emergency situations such as Firefighting and Police Control where drones can also be utilized to obtain georeferenced footages and images which are sent to the controller and to the security forces allowing better control and decision of the overall situation. Another use case can be offered to schools where content delivery and AR/VR technology for students can be leveraged making learning more fun and interactive.

Rural markets have a clear demand for services running at the Edge. With 5G network, this demand will be surely driven further as more vertical applications can be provided.

Advantages of Rural & Remote Connectivity

Accelerators on the Edge

Advancements in GPU technology and the growing demand for artificial intelligence and highperformance computing have changed the way a growing number of industries extract value from their data and push IT performance to new heights.

Edge computing offers the distinct advantage of harnessing compute capabilities on resources located at the edge of the network to run workloads of relatively weak user devices. This is achieved by offloading computationally intensive workloads, to the edge.

This solution delivers any Windows application to any device anywhere, anytime. The server resource usage is optimized to increase cloud scalability and reducing the cost.

There are a few distinct use case where Accelerators on the Edge can be applied:

The technology permits to raise more sessions concurrently in the server reducing the cost for the customer drastically

Using our end-to-end orchestration platform, the Nearby One; we can orchestrate and virtualize any kind of resource hungry application on the Edge to handle your most complex workloads including:

R Processing power for any applications including 3D, CAD, CAE, CDF rendering and modelling tools

R Data science mining

R Research that requires high performance computation for scientific visualization and modelling.

R Any applications that require machine learning, deep learning, neural networks and AI

OpenRAN | vRAN | FlexRAN

The RAN market has traditionally been dominated by a handful of organizations that do not design their RAN infrastructure to be interoperable. This forced network operators into vendor lock-in where operators must depend on equipment from exclusively one vendor. Without open interoperability standards, there was little space for new vendors at any level of the RAN market to get started. That is why open standards have grown steadily in the RAN space, with investments from both the traditional providers as well as Infrastructure players such as Intel and others. Concepts such as OpenRAN, vRAN and FlexRAN have become more common place, especially with adoption from service providers, due to the interoperability and reduced footprint that it fosters.

Using a select few partners, Nearby Computing offers OpenRAN solutions that are highly flexible and with a highly scalable architecture that allows mobile operators to deploy RAN and edge infrastructure using virtualized and decentralized components. These solutions cover all the implementations of RAN, from disaggregated RAN functionality built using open interface specifications between elements (OpenRAN) to an implementation of the RAN in a more open and flexible architecture which virtualizes network functions in software platforms based on general purpose processors (vRAN).These Open and Containerised RAN Software solutions support an economically viable alternative to the traditional mobile telecom approach. With the unique software architecture offered by our Open RAN partner and together with the end-to-end orchestration capabilities of the NearbyOne, we can unlock the true potential of software-defined networks and network virtualisation to better serve Private, Public and Neutral Host networks. 

customer benefits

AI on the Edge

Digital transformations are being fuel-injected by leading enterprise tech like hybrid clouds, containers, and AI.

Adding to the acceleration is 5G, which is adding decentralized data and application processing from millions of endpoints outside the traditional datacentre and public cloud. But while transformation and modernization are bringing improved enterprise performance, efficiency, and agility, these increasingly complicated infrastructures are also complicating data management and availability, especially for AI workloads.

The AI on the Edge solutions from Nearby Computing helps run AI algorithms locally on an edge node (hardware device) where these algorithms are based on the data that are created on the device without requiring any connection. This allows you to process data with the device in less than a few milliseconds which gives you real-time information. AI processing today is mostly done in a cloud-based data centre with deep earning models that require heavy compute capacity. However, with AI on the Edge, processing is now moving part of the AI workflow to a device and keeping data constrained to an edge node.

Why is AI on the Edge important?

R By processing data locally, you can avoid the problem with streaming and storing a lot of data to the cloud that makes you vulnerable from a privacy perspective.

Moving the AI processing to an edge node brings about numerous benefits including reducing cost, increased security, highly responsive resulting in quick decision making and the ability to easily manage the data generated. The intelligent edge is a continually expanding set of connected systems and devices that gather and analyse data—close to end users and the data that is generated. Together, they give customers the ability to create a new class of distributed, connected applications that enable breakthrough business outcomes.