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The need to interface and exchange information through these open APIs will allow competitive offerings for Consumers, Enterprises, and Vertical Industry end-user segments. For instance, open APIs will be provided between Telcos and public cloud edge compute platforms such as Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Anthos, AliCloud Edge Node Service (ENS), AWS Wavelength, Microsoft Azure Edge Zones, Tencent Edge Computing Machine (ECM), to name a few. These APIs are not limited to providing basic connectivity services but will include the ability to deliver predictable data rate, predictable latency, reliability, service insertion, security, AI and RAN analytics, network slicing and more. These capabilities are needed to support a multitude of emerging applications such as AR/VR, Industrial IoT, autonomous vehicles, drones, Industry 4.0 initiatives, Smart Cities, Smart Ports. Other APIs will include exposure to edge orchestration and management, Edge monitoring (KPIs), and more. These open APIs will be the foundation for service and instrumentation APIs when integrating with public cloud development environments and will be defined as part of the implementation. Even though these APIs will be common across all Telco operators, the differentiation will based on services provided through those APIs.
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Telcos and Hyperscalers are powerful in their respective domains. How would their partnerships work when they meet at the edge? What would be the technical collaboration interfaces? Within each country usually there are M operators with overlapping coverage and N Hyperscalers serving the same areas. With this M to N mesh relationship, would it make sense to have common interfaces ? Hyperscalers are big on APIs – how would Telco network edge capabilities be exposed as APIs? There are many questions with no ready made answers. Needless to say, business relationships of all Edge players is are equally important in this domain. Telcos and Hyperscalers both carry their own eco-systems. How these eco-systems would collaborate poses another challenge.
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