I had the great pleasure to represent the MEC ISG as ETSI MEC ISG chair and to present Mobile Edge Computing at the co-located 5G Observatory and Fog Networking conferences that took place on March 8-11, 2016 in Paris. Philip Lamoureux from Juniper represented the ISG at the MPLS+SDN+NFV world congress. Both congresses were endorsed by ETSI.
The congress attracted 1500+ attendees, coming from 65 countries, with a strong presence of service providers.

I also chaired the NFV track at the tutorial day, where the latest news from ETSI NFV were presented as well as the relationships with the industry standards bodies and open source projects (which is essential for creating an open interoperable ecosystem). Also the usage of SDN in the NFV architectural framework was discussed.

We enjoyed high quality presentations during the whole congress!

The MEC presentation was very well received and the value and opportunities with MEC were clearly acknowledged. There was no question of “if MEC happens”.

The key messages from the congresses were that:

• NFV and SDN are happening. 5G is the future Internet as a whole, including 3GPP and non-3GPP RAN(s) and a convergent core network.
• 5G will be designed with a full software approach (SDN/NFV) that will transform the networks into one programmable and unified infrastructure, paving the road to new business models and value propositions. The design principles for 5G should ensure energy efficiency (some would say divided by 2), ultra-low cost networks for low density and very low ARPU areas.
• Market opportunities rely on close collaboration between the telecom industry and vertical & IoT players.
• First release of 5G (3GPP 5G phase 1, Release 15) will come by mid-2018. MEC creates a pathway to 5G, but there is no need to wait until 5G is ready. MEC can play a major role within existing 3G and 4G networks and enable many of the use cases. Delivering an improved end-to-end customer experience is crucial. With 5G, MEC will be able to provide greater value.
• There is a great synergy between Mobile Edge Computing and Fog Networking and the Mobile Edge Computing architecture and APIs should be utilized by Fog Networking.
• MEC has a strong case for optimizing the backhaul/transport network.

At the Fog Networking the drivers, the applicable use cases and interesting PoCs were presented. The synergy with Mobile Edge Computing was acknowledged as well as the fact that the Mobile Edge Computing architecture smoothly satisfies their architecture principles and requirements. In Fog Networking they do not develop standards and they agreed to contribute to the development of the specification in ETSI MEC. Combining efforts will enable a larger market place for Mobile Edge Computing.