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Google acquired MobiledgeX, announcing to open source its software. MobiledgeX was founded in 2017 as an independent offshoot from Deutsche Telekom (DT) with the promise of Edge Computing, consistent mobile APIs, an easy control plane across telecoms (operating independently of DT was key for this), and Multi-Cloud operations. One of their earliest announcements was with Niantic (the makers of Pokemón Go). You can see that announcement here. From the surface, this announcement sounded amazing!

Hawaiian Airlines and Starlink announced a free Internet offering on Hawaiian’s trans-pacific fleet. But is this real? Hawaiian doesn’t offer Internet access today and with all of their flights over water, satellite Internet access is the only viable choice. Hawaiian’s President and CEO Peter Ingram said: “When we launch with Starlink we will have the best connectivity experience available in the air. We waited until technology caught up with our high standards for guest experience, but it will be worth the wait.

Today, Federated Wireless announced that the U.S. Marine Corps have started building a private 5G network. See their release here. The article says: ...The deployment will become a reference design for smart warehouse automation across the armed services... This is an overly complicated network, to operate functions that could be done with simpler, and significantly cheaper, technologies like WiFi. While its fun to see the new tools like this coming to life, the practical use of them is quite limited.

Is This The Edge? Verizon and AWS announced they have added three additional “5G MEC” cities, bringing their total to five. These five cities are now Atlanta, Boston, New York, San Francisco Bay Area and Washington DC. You can read the announcement here This might sound interesting, but what is in it? So, you might be able to get low latency to Verizon’s network from these Wavelength locations. AWS also describes this here

Mobile Edge Computing is just on-prem. AT&T sent out this ‘white paper’ to a mailing list. You can see the white-paper here. Funnily enough, Kelsey Hightower tweeted this today. If you're stuck on-prem, and starting to feel like you missed out on the cloud native movement, just start calling it "edge" and consider your digital transformation complete. — Kelsey Hightower (@kelseyhightower) September 22, 2020 Back to the AT&T, the whitepaper details:

More than 70 percent of the world’s internet traffic passes through Loudoun’s digital infrastructure A frequent claim, 70% of Internet traffic passes through Ashburn / Loudoun County. This is a constant lie that gets circulated around the Internet. It’s even published on the Loudoun County Government Webpage. This couldn’t be further from the truth. The biggest debunker is the Edge Network. For an Internet Service Provider (ISP) in the western world, they can receive around 75% of their Internet traffic from a handfull of sources.

The Internet is a buzz with things called “Edge”, but what does it actually mean? Wikipedia describes Edge Computing as follows: Edge computing is a distributed computing paradigm which brings computation and data storage closer to the location where it is needed, to improve response times and save bandwidth. This doesn’t sound like anything very new, infact Wikipedia continues to explain: The origins of edge computing lie in content delivery networks that were created in the late 1990s to serve web and video content from edge servers that were deployed close to users.