Google LLC today announced it has inked a partnership with Ericsson to develop new joint offerings that will help enterprises harness ultrafast 5G network connections in their technology projects.

Telecommunications providers worldwide are upgrading their networks to the 5G standard, which promises to enable connections up to 100 times faster than before. Those speedy connections allow enterprises to perform tasks that weren’t practical until now. Manufacturers, for example, can quickly upload sensor data from their equipment to the cloud for analysis and alert technicians to potential malfunctions in near real-time.

Google is building products that enable organizations apply 5G in their operations with less effort. As part of its strategy, the search giant has partnered with numerous telecommunications providers and tech firms worldwide to help bring its 5G products to more enterprises around the globe. The new partnership with Ericsson, one of the biggest players in the 5G ecosystem, marks a notable milestone in the effort.

Sweden-based Ericsson is a major supplier of networking equipment to the telecommunications sector. The company makes, among other products, hardware and software for building 5G networks. As part of the partnership announced today, Google will work with Ericsson to bring joint offerings to market that will combine their respective technologies to help enterprises use 5G more effectively.

The search giant shared a few early details about the effort this morning as the Mobile World Congress conference in Barcelona began its second day. The joint offerings, it said, will be built with the help of D15 Labs, a research and development center operated by Ericsson that has an on-premises 5G network for testing new technologies. 

The companies say that they’ve already “completed functional onboarding of Ericsson 5G” on Anthos to enable telco edge and on-premises use cases.

The “telco edge” is a term that describes an emerging business model whereby carriers lease some of their computing infrastructure to enterprises. A manufacturer, for example, may wish to run the monitoring application it uses to track the health of its factory equipment in close physical proximity to the factory. If a carrier has computing hardware available near the factory, it can make the infrastructure available to the manufacturer, which can in turn use it to host the monitoring application.

This approach is gaining traction because hosting workloads close to a company’s assets reduces network latency and thereby speeds up processing. Google is targeting such edge telco use cases with its Anthos platform, which provides a kind of operating system for running applications at the edge of the network in proximity to enterprise assets. Anthos also supports other types of environments.

Google and Ericsson are exploring new ways of combining Anthos and 5G infrastructure not only at the latter firm’s D15 Labs center but also on a wireless network operated by Italian carrier TIM. The companies are using Google’s cloud technology and Ericsson’s 5G gear for a pilot project focused on running enterprise applications at the edge of the network. The applications, the companies said, aim to help organizations in manufacturing, transportation and a number of other sectors improve operational efficiency. 

“Organizations have a tremendous opportunity to digitally transform their businesses with 5G and cloud capabilities like artificial intelligence and machine learning at the edge,” said Google Cloud Chief Executive Officer Thomas Kurian.

Image: Google