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! A massive mobile game and experience, heavily using AR/VR in a live environment. This is the “use case” that telecoms are screaming for when they look for 5G compute.
Was this real? Was any traffic actually running on it? Announcements like these are often positioned as press, but not to actually use the infrastructure. Meanwhile, Google Cloud blogged about Pokemón Go scaling on GCP.
Nonetheless, this announcement was great for Deutsche. A NEW mobile application running on their cloud, and using buzzwords galore. Fast-forward 3 years and there wasn’t much movement. Many press releases came and went, but nothing substantial.
“We have five edge sites deployed in Germany and
very limited customers – The use cases are not
coming as fast.”
– Abdu Mudesir, Deutsche Telekom CTO at MWC 2022
And so, just like that MobiledgeX is no more. Google (or someone) has quickly worked to erase all online presence of MobiledgeX. Their website currently returns some errors (and an invalid SSL certificate). Just the waybackmachine at archive.org has some slices of their web history.
But what is the future for Edge Compute?
One of the problems with Edge Computing and especially as it relates to 5G has always been the demand for use-cases. There has been a dream that some magical use-case will demand investment, be it AR/VR, autonomous cars, healthcare, et al., and the telecoms and app developers can be prancing through a field of capital investments.
The reality is, new use cases won’t come. There is an amazing existing use-case, but the Industry is largely turning a blind eye to it; the Internet. The Internet isn’t new, it isn’t sexy. Compute on the Internet is abundant and performant. While so much compute happens in the major public clouds in a limited number of data centers, that is rapidly changing. More major clouds are deploying closer to users.
Serverless applications have the ability to run region-less, not tied to any individual location, but all across a platform giving all Internet users low latency access. Custom orchestration isn’t needed to piece together different infrastructure from different telecoms at all; in-fact the Telecom’s don’t need to do much except provide Internet access and it’ll give the best platform and use case for everyone.
So, MobiledgeX is dead. Long live the true Edge, the Internet.