Huawei edges closer to the front of the MEC queue

Huawei has announced a new industry collaboration which will see 13 organizations establish a virtual multi-access edge computing (MEC) ecosystem collaborative circle.

The term ‘collaborative circle’ sounds like something from a cult, or a scene from a dodgy porno, but essentially Huawei is creating a working group which looks to push forward in the MEC world. In all fairness, it has gathered some heavy weights to push the envelope.

Members of the new gang will be China Mobile, China Unicom, China Telecom, China Communications Standards Association, China Computer Federation, the GSMA, 3GPP, ETSI,  the Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC), Intel, ARM, Trend Micro, and iQiyi.

“Currently, there is no such industry alliance to promote development of the MEC industry, which is a key challenge for us,” said Long Jiping, VP of Huawei’s Cloud Core Network Product Line. “All industry players should work together to drive the MEC industry forward and explore edge network capabilities to commercialize MEC and achieve business success.”

While it has seemingly lost some of it glamour over the last couple of years, MEC promises to be a pretty substantial technology in the network-straining world of 5G. The ability to host certain bits of content on the edge of the network works for both the CSPs, it reduces congestion on the network, and the consumer, connectivity will be improved. But people aren’t really talking about it that much.

“The next step for MEC networks should focus on building a unified network architecture through standards organizations,” said Yang Zhiqiang, Deputy GM of China Mobile Research Institute. “The architecture needs to enable unified scheduling and management, and flexible control and loading of edge nodes, thus creating an array of applications.”

MEC is going to be an important area of the connected era, and Huawei is not doing a bad job to get to the front of the queue here. Standards might be boring, but the importance of an opportunity to influence the development of said standards should not be underplayed.