UPDATED 16:44 EDT / SEPTEMBER 22 2020

CLOUD

AWS adds Wavelength Zones in bid to cash in on 5G fever

Amazon Web Services Inc. today said it’s adding three new zones to its Wavelength service for edge computing and 5G networks.

With the addition of Atlanta, New York City, and Washington, D.C. AWS now has five Wavelength Zones on Verizon Communications Inc.’s 5G network in the U.S. Zones were previously announced in Boston and the San Francisco Bay Area.

Wavelength, which was first rolled out in August, is AWS’ marker in what is expected to be an explosion of services around the next generation of wireless technology called 5G. Through partnerships with Verizon, the U.K.-based Vodafone Group plc, Japan’s KDDI Corp. and Korea’s SK Telcom Co. Ltd., the cloud giant aims to install its servers in carrier sites and colocation providers around the world to enable customers to build a new generation of distributed applications that shift more intelligence to the edge of the network.

Wavelength is intended to minimize the latency and network hops required to connect from a 5G device to an application hosted on AWS. Low latency will be needed by the growing number of “internet of things” devices, sensors and navigation systems needed for applications like autonomous vehicles. Research firm Transforma Insights expects the number of active IoT devices to more than triple to 24 billion in 2030, while Grand View Research Inc. forecasts the market for 5G services to expand 44% annually over the next seven years.

In many ways, Wavelength resembles Outposts, the version of AWS servers that the company installs in customers’ data centers and operates as an extension of the AWS cloud. A Wavelength instance is “in a different data center, but in every other respect it’s part of AWS,” said Raj Pai, vice president of EC2 product  management at AWS. “It’s a completely seamless experience. Software updates roll across Wavelength zones just like other AWS regions.”

5G gold rush

5G is expected to open a wide range of new applications that are currently impractical or impossible to develop because of network latency. Users of current 4G and LTE networks might typically experience latency of 130 milliseconds, or thousandth of a second. In contrast, “if you’re on a 5G phone you’re approaching single-digit milliseconds of latency,” Pai said.

That might may not seem like very long, but it can be an eternity for a self-driving vehicle that is facing the risk of an accident. Latency also inhibits applications like interactive gaming and real-time video streaming.

One Wavelength customer is currently testing a stadium-wide system that aggregates video streams of a live event and individualizes the view for people in the stands by predicting where each will navigate next and serving up a custom view at 4K resolution, Pai said. Media companies that can’t migrate video rendering to the cloud because of latency restrictions will be able to make the switch once 5G is in place, he added.

There are actually three versions of the 5G wireless protocol. What’s generating the most excitement is the high-band service that supports speeds that rival that of hardwired Ethernet connections and also enable signals to be sliced into multiple virtualized and independent logical networks that run on the same physical network infrastructure. In effect, each person connected to the network has the full bandwidth available.

However, high-frequency signals don’t travel very far, which means that transceivers must be placed close together. Carriers and colocation facilities are hurriedly putting the equipment in place to aggregate nearby 5G signals and AWS wants to be the infrastructure provider of choice.

Wavelength supports existing wireless protocols but AWS is most focused on the 5G services that are rolling out rapidly in Europe and Asia and are ramping up in the U.S. The infrastructure it’s putting in place looks to customers like the existing Amazon cloud, Pai said.

“When you launch an instance you simply extend your subnet in your [virtual private cloud] to that zone,” he said. “Both resources have full connectivity to the rest of your infrastructure in that region. You’re using the exact same [command line interface], same console and same tools.” The idea is for developers to be able to shift the latency-sensitive parts of their applications close to the edge without having to rebuild them from scratch.

AWS intends to expand Wavelength as quickly as carriers add coverage. “We’re installing to the extent that 5G is available,” Pai said. Carrier partners must demonstrate that they can provide the same security and availability as in Amazon’s own data centers along with service-level agreements, alerts and alarms that correlate to those in the AWS cloud.

Image: Pixabay

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