Reportedly, Etisalat UAE, the nation’s biggest telecoms provider and part of the newly rebranded e& conglomerate, and China’s Huawei Technologies signed an agreement to launch the Middle East’s first 5G Edge box, which will enable more seamless delivery of services to customers.
The deal follows the announcement of a successful test of a cloud-centric 5G Edge computing platform, which the Abu Dhabi-based telecoms operator aims to leverage for sustainable business growth in the B2B segment, the companies said in a joint statement on Tuesday.
The agreement was signed at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona.
“The success of this testing activity will support UAE industries and the government sector in achieving their digital transformational objectives as we deploy a full suite of on-premise private 5G connectivity with inventive digital use cases requiring low latency and extreme reliability,” said Khalid Murshed, chief technology, and information officer of Etisalat UAE.
Edge computing in the telecoms industry moves the computing of traffic and services from a centralized cloud to the edge of the network and closer to the customer, Juniper networks reported.
The main driving force for Edge technology is 5G, the present mobile communications standard. By 2025, 5G will be the “excessively used” access technology for multi-access edge computing (MEC) use cases at 100 percent, followed by fixed Wi-Fi, which is expected to be “excessively” and “significantly” used at both 37 percent, said MWC organizers the GSMA Association.
The “5G in a Box” concept, meanwhile, uses programmable hardware platforms and high-performance commodity computing servers to offer a generic and programmable platform for deployment at the edges of a 5G network, the University of Bristol said.
The cloud is also a key component of Edge computing. By 2025, 75 percent of organizations will use cloud services, research firm Gartner said.
Also, Dubai’s Emirates Integrated Telecommunications Company on Tuesday announced a similar preliminary agreement with Huawei at the MWC in which the two companies will collaborate to develop MEC that will help the operator, known as du, diversify its communications services.
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