Nine Global Carriers Band Together
SK Telecom will promote global cooperation to commercialize 5G mobile edge computing (MEC) technology.
SK Telecom announced on March 1 that nine global telecom carriers launched the Telecom Edge Cloud Task Force at the GSMA General Assembly in London on Feb. 24. The nine carriers included SK Telecom, Deutsche Telecom, EE, KDDI, Orange, Telephonica, Telecom Italia, China Unicom, SingTel and NTT DoCoMo.
The task force was launched to promote the commercialization and versatility of 5G MEC, a key technology that enhances the performance of ultra low-delay services such as cloud games, smart factories, and autonomous driving.
The task force aims to achieve global commercialization of 5G MEC technology through interoperation among edge cloud computing systems built by telecommunication companies. To this end, participating companies plan to connect and share edge cloud technologies and services owned by each company.
SK Telecom, in particular, is the only mobile carrier with 5G-based edge cloud technology, and plans to lead the global commercialization of 5G MEC technology by strengthening cooperation with global carriers.
Global cooperation is vital to increasing the versatility of 5G MEC technologies and services and ensuring a rapid development of the technology ecosystem. If technology and service interoperation is not established among service providers, a service developer must go through the process of developing the same service separately for each service provider's 5G MEC system.
In fact, SK Telecom is working together to create models and solutions and set up standards to link 5G MEC technologies and services by forming the Operator Platform Task Force with the GSMA and major members of GSMA including Deutsche Telecom and Telephonica since September 2019.
Meanwhile, SK Telecom is making endeavors to commercialize 5G MEC by launching the Global MEC Task Force in January with five companies — SingTel, Globe, Taiwan Mobile, HKT and PCCW Global.