Verizon 5G Edge with AWS Wavelength comes to Charlotte, Detroit, Los Angeles and Minneapolis
Verizon and AWS announced the addition of new 5G mobile edge computing services in four more U.S. metropolitan areas this week. Charlotte, Detroit, Los Angeles and Minneapolis are the four newest U.S. metro areas to receive Verizon 5G Edge with AWS Wavelength service. Edge computing services like the Verizon and AWS minimize data latency by reducing the distance between the end user and the service.
Those locations join 14 others: Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Houston, Las Vegas, Miami, New York City, Phoenix, San Francisco’s Bay Area, Seattle and Washington, D.C. Verizon highlighted the network’s ability to perform for customers building autonomous drone and vehicle technology in a new blog post.
Making the move to the edge requires specialized institutional knowledge. Verizon is aiming to help offset that for businesses by working with Software as a Service (SaaS) providers. The two mentioned by Verizon are cloud-native enterprise database SaaS maker Couchbase and Confluent, an enterprise data streaming and processing platform.
“Using infrastructure templates, Verizon and AWS seamlessly extended the capabilities of these providers to the edge to automate the complexity of edge networking, core compute, and the software itself,” said the company.
Ease of use for mobile app developers is also the driver for Verizon’s 5G Edge Discovery Service, available through Verizon’s 5G Edge developer portal. Verizon offers that and other Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for mobile app developers are available to assist with 5G edge integration.
Rearchitecting for the mobile edge
Verizon and AWS first announced their collaboration during AWS re:Invent in 2019. They flipped the switch on the service in 2020 with service in Boston and San Francisco. Other cities including Atlanta, New York and Washington, DC joined the list later that year. Since then, the companies have gradually built out locations.
The mobile edge computing service engineered by Verizon and AWS required both companies to rearchitect some of their assets, the company revealed in an interview with RCR Wireless News.
First, Verizon had to rearchitect its network so that we could enable any compute resource to be deployed across our network architecture,” said Verizon’s director of IoT Thierry Sender. “On our end, we enabled any place in the network to become an endpoint for compute.”
The system also required AWS to rearchitect their container orchestration services to separate edge compute capabilities from the control plane.
