2019 & Beyond: Mobile Operators and Public Cloud Providers Collaborating in the World of 5G, IoT & Edge Computing

Nadeem Uraizee
5 min readApr 7, 2019

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In the last few years we have seen some impressive investments happening across 5G infrastructure & monetization, Edge computing, and Internet of Things to develop a partner ecosystem involving chipsets manufactures, devices/module creators and cloud platforms. Building such an ecosystem helps unlock unique use cases that address business challenges and provide an ultimate ROI to end users.

Given the amount of potential here, I’ve been thinking a lot about how mobile operators and public cloud products such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Oracle, etc. can tighten their collaboration and vastly improve the playground for end consumers with this combined effort. This post highlights some areas where collaboration can occur that not only benefits both parties but end users such as enterprises, smart cities + government agencies, automotive and transportation industries, utility companies and more.

Mobile Operators:

As most people know, 5G is a prime enabler for mobile networks with its promise around considerably improving bandwidth and latency (which originally restricted the 4G LTE networks). Examples of the expected use cases, but not limited to these alone, are around wireless broadband, 5G gaming (improved latency), AR/VR and drones as a service, V2x, and 5G in Retail Brick & Mortars.

Similarly, for IoT and Edge computing (both in the current networks & 5G) sample emerging use cases exist around building connected factories, thermal imaging solutions (I’ve been working with the State of California to prevent future wildfires from getting out of control), object tracking, video analytics, indoor positioning BLE/UWB based sensors backhauled through NB/LTE-M IoT networks, and Edge analytics for IoT.

Public Cloud IoT Providers:

Public cloud providers have already invested in or are in the process of launching big investments around edge computing, IoT and to some extent, devising a strategy to best leverage 5G. They already have an impressive list of end users and partners that are taking the IoT/Cloud computing play to the next level. For example, Amazon recently announced that Amazon Web Services (AWS) will work with Volkswagen to connect and manage VW’s manufacturing plants and supply chain as part of their Industrial Cloud development. Similarly, Microsoft announced an Open Manufacturing Platform (OMP) which aims to create smart factory solutions with BMW using its Azure Cloud and IoT infrastructure.

There are several more examples where these two companies are playing big in other areas of IoT and Cloud computing; Amazon is investing heavily in Greengrass, FreeRTOS, Core Cloud/Analytics/Device management with thousands of partners that are innovating every day and the same goes for Microsoft.

In this ecosystem, imagine bringing mobile operators that are “not limited to connectivity” but rather collaborating closely on these use cases (for example, with connected factories). Just as referenced above with VW and BMW further enhancing capabilities with low latency and high bandwidth 5G networks, these companies could also use a rich amount of data for performance analytics available in the mobile networks. This intelligence can be incorporated into the data lakes of AWS or Azure which would enhance the total end offering thereby benefitting the automotive industry. There are numerous other examples where such combined relationships can grow to benefit both parties and end customers.

Considerations:

Some of the key considerations and needs that come to mind from the network/business integration point of view are as follows:

  1. Simplified network and policy management operations across remote branches, data center and cloud between two providers i.e. mobile and public IoT cloud providers needs to be established.
  2. LTE/5G radio transport integration between IoT Sensors/Devices and Public IoT Cloud (Amazon/Microsoft) Edge Core (e.g. AWS Greengrass/Microsoft Edge modules and Edge aggregation routers that will provide a transport network layer for LTE/5G radio).
  3. Establish secure overlay connections between Public Cloud VPCs and remote networks and branches with a centralized SD-WAN policy model.
  4. Mobile Edge computing platform implementation with an environment where applications/analytics/machine learning can be done on the Edge of the Radio network with Public cloud providers’ Edge components (again such as Greengrass etc.). This capability is already available in the Mobile edge computing platform; however, optimization needs to happen depending on the use cases.
  5. Establish subscriber management, authentication, security policies between mobile network operators and Public Cloud providers;
  6. Establish GTM model and framework agreement between the Mobile operator and Public Cloud vendors to address approaches around IoT and 5G use case implementations.
  7. ROI model between mobile operators and public IoT cloud providers could be revenue share; requires agreements of course.

Benefits:

  1. Mobile operators can benefit from cloud end consumer partnerships by providing another layer of connectivity over NB-IoT and LTE-M to the Edge devices through FreeRTOS modules. For example, we could extend connectivity to Silicon vendors by having them include NB-IoT/LTE-M capabilities in existing FreeRTOS or Microsoft edge modules.
  2. Public Cloud IoT providers can benefit from the 5G capabilities of mobile operators including the vertical use cases that will bring low latency and bandwidth (a game changer for use cases that will require these 5G enhancements).
  3. Solving business challenges is the promise that 5G and IoT would like to deliver for the benefit of end consumers (already listed several above).
  4. Offers customers a seamless experience with the ability to launch branch devices irrespective of on-premise or AWS/Azure VPC based location.
  5. Provides a seamless “connectivity” experience for service provider and enterprise customers.

Overall, a collaboration effort between all parties will hasten innovation and bring incredible experiences including solving key business opportunities across all sectors of Edge computation, 5G technology monetization, and IoT use cases…ultimately benefiting the ecosystem end to end.

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Nadeem Uraizee

Head of IoT, AR/VR, 5G Cloud and Partner Management @Nokia Seattle