Deutsche Telekom is living on the edge

The Living Edge Lab testbed, conducted by DT, Crown Castle and Altiostar, claims to be pushing the edge computing envelope.

As we get closer to 5G actually being a thing, as opposed to a flood of PowerPoint presentations and hastily arranged partnerships, the emphasis is on ‘real world’ testing, as evidenced by Huawei’s efforts in Canada. This initiative took the form of ‘an ultra-low latency mobile testbed to three sites centered on Carnegie Mellon University in the US’.

Edge computing will be a key component of 5G, especially from a low-latency perspective, as the best way to reduce the amount of time it takes a mobile signal to get from A to B is to reduce the distance it has to travel. The more stuff you can do on the edge of the network, as opposed to the core, the lower the latency, says the prevailing wisdom.

“The Living Edge Lab testbed is a major technology milestone towards use-case centric Edge Computing and will provide application developers with an early experience of the benefits of 5G technology,” said Alex Jinsung Choi, SVP Research and Technology Innovation at Deutsche Telekom. “It is a unique Edge Computing platform that leverages a fully virtualized end-to-end solution and the implementation of user-tracing beamforming antennas for the first time in a live environment.”

There you have it. They are trying out all the latest radio technologies there, are currently working with latencies down to 15ms, and seem to be focused on the 3.5 GHz band. It should be noted that Aerosmith have been calling for this kind of thing since the early 1990s and they will no doubt be gratified to see the telecoms industry finally take note.