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
Notably: Application traffic can reach application servers running
in Wavelength Zones without leaving the mobile network
Of cos, their description also includes a use case of autonomous driving…
So, what does it mean to run the “Applications servers without leaving the mobile network”? Actually, its pretty easy to detect. Looking at Verizon Wireless’s AS Number AS22394, you can see, one of these things is not like the other things!
These two prefixes are owned by Amazon/AWS. What really stands out is the route security attached to them. Amazon cares about RPKI and BGP routing security, but Verizon doesn’t care yet, so they stick out like a sore thumb (see the green 🔑 in the image.)
There is also a number of prefixes announced in (AS6167)[https://bgp.he.net/AS6167#_prefixes], another AS Number owned by Verizon Wireless.
155.146.0.0/20 - Boston
155.146.16.0/20 - SF Bay Area
155.146.32.0/20 - Washington DC
155.146.48.0/20 - Atlanta
155.146.80.0/20 - ?
So what does it mean to be inside the Mobile network? That’s just somewhere in the mobile networks’ IP network. And the Wavelength nodes in AS6167 is already crossing the AS-Boundary from the actual mobile network (AS22394). Then what’s the difference with a public cloud just peering in the same city as Verizon?
Most major clouds are directly connected to Verizon’s network. Does this make them all edge computing?