SK Telecom (SKT) said Wednesday that MEC cooperation was disclosed at the annual AWS event in Las Vegas. The joint project will be carried out next year to launch 5G MEC services targeting corporate customers in the fields of distribution, game, media and manufacturing. SKT aims to introduce customized MEC services by establishing 5G MEC infrastructure inside target companies.
5G MEC technology is designed to be implemented at cellular base stations or other edge nodes and enables flexible and rapid deployment of new applications and services for clients. By running applications and performing related processing tasks closer to the cellular customer, network congestion is reduced and applications perform better.
The establishment of 5G networks in South Korea triggered a flurry of business cooperation in various industrial sectors, especially in robots and smart factories, while mobile carriers have tried to develop 5G edge cloud-based solutions for businesses.
In February, KT teamed up with Cognex, an American developer of machine vision, to commercialize a 5G-based edge cloud-based machine vision solution.
SKT has partnered with MobiledgeX, a San Francisco-based edge computing company. Edge cloud, or edge computing, is a computing infrastructure established close to the sources of data such as Internet of things (IoT) devices and machines inside a smart factory. It is capable of gathering and analyzing data at the sources of data.