GSMA THRIVE NORTH AMERICA: Samer Geissah, director of technology strategy and architecture at Telus (pictured), spotlighted collaboration as key to delivering on the promise of low-latency applications, noting operators need to work together to ensure consistent performance across their networks.

Geissah said developers of latency-sensitive applications want to distribute their products across many geographies “not just one operator in one county”, and expect the same performance from an operator in Canada as one in Spain.

He noted more than 20 operators are now involved in a project to define the “mandatory building blocks” needed to deliver consistency across global networks as part of the GSMA-backed Telco Edge Cloud (TEC) Platform initiative, up from nine when it launched in February.

At the heart of the effort is a focus on using open APIs to smooth service deployments. While some previous operator collaborations fell flat, Geissah noted the TEC work is different because there are strong outside motivations for operators to deliver.

“The TEC is not just operators sitting down and saying well that’s a brilliant idea. We have also partners and vendors and cloud providers, hyperscalers that have joined this initiative trying to see it through.”