Cloud and Edge Testing

Service providers expect 5G to help power critical business transformation by diversifying and growing revenue streams. The right strategy will support rollout of new services in weeks versus months, with always-on, high-performance, and expansive coverage attracting and delighting customers.

Everything about 5G networks is bigger. For 4G, a large national provider might have a network topology with ten physical data centers. Mobile core functions deployed at these locations represent the edge of the mobile network – the point at which core networks interface with radio networks via IP aggregation and backhaul networks. While expensive, for 4G, a service provider could deploy service assurance probes at each of these locations to effectively monitor all user traffic and signaling.

Hyperscalers and operators offering public or private clouds must ensure three delivery phases are validated for success throughout the solution lifecycle. They are: launch, optimization and operation, with testing and validation requirements extending across all phases.

With operators around the world launching 5G MEC services, the question on everyone’s mind is “how low is the latency?” But really that’s just one of the questions we should be asking. We need to know what use cases will drive early adoption of MEC and whether 5G MEC latency is low enough for those use cases. Join latency experts Darius Singh, Principal Consultant at STL Partners, Stephen Douglas, Head of Market Strategy at Spirent, and Rich McNally, Sr. Director of Mobile Service Strategy at Spirent as they shed light on these critical questions with real-world measurements of 5G MEC and public cloud latency, and insightful analysis of the latency needs of emerging use cases.