AWS to offer edge computing in partnership with Vodafone in Europe

Earlier this week, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced AWS Wavelength which will embed AWS’s compute and storage services at the edge of mobile network operators’ networks.

The company claims that this will allow developers’ applications to serve end-users with single-digit millisecond (ms) latencies over 5G networks, rather than the more than 100ms latencies that can occur under the current set-up in which application traffic has to travel from a device to a cell tower to metro aggregation sites to regional aggregation sites and to the Internet before it can access resources running in AWS.

Use cases that require this approach include machine learning inference at the edge, autonomous industrial equipment, smart cars and cities, the Internet of Things (IoT), and augmented and virtual reality.

Vodafone Business is collaborating with AWS to make AWS Wavelength available in Europe and it claims that the service will be available first in the UK and Germany on the Vodafone 5G network, before expanding to other Vodafone markets across Europe.

“With Europe’s largest 5G network across 58 cities and as a global leader in IoT with over 90 million connections, Vodafone is pleased to be the first telco to introduce AWS Wavelength in Europe,” said Vinod Kumar, CEO of Vodafone Business. “Faster speeds and lower latencies have the potential to revolutionise how our customers do business, and they can rely on Vodafone’s existing capabilities and security layers within our own network.”