Vodafone deploys AWS Wavelength in London with plans for Dusseldorf

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Vodafone confirmed today that they’ve now deployed AWS Wavelength zones in London on Vodafone’s 4G/5G network. The partners said late in 2020 that they were planning to do this. They also said today that they’re planning to deploy another AWS Wavelength location at Vodafone’s mobile network in Dusseldorf, Germany with general availability scheduled for later in 2021.

Wavelength is designed to bring AWS compute and storage to the edge of mobile networks.

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The partners say their joint business customers in the U.K. can now deploy their applications that require ultra-low latency at the edge of Vodafone’s network, using the same AWS software they are accustomed to. Wavelength removes the latency that results from accessing the cloud using traditional mobile architectures that require multiple hops between regional aggregation sites.

AWS says that in addition to its London deployment of Wavelength, it also has Wavelength deployments at the edge of carrier networks in South Korea, Japan and 10 cities across the United States.

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Speaking at a Fierce event earlier this year, Vodafone Business’ head of cloud portfolio management Jennifer Didoni said that Vodafone has two types of edge. It has a distributed edge, which is where the edge operates from the Vodafone mobile wide area network. “So anybody with a Vodafone SIM can reach that particular edge, and that’s where we’ve been working with AWS Wavelength,” said Didoni.

In addition, Vodafone offers a dedicated private edge network. “We give them the cloud computing experience, but it’s on a hardware stack and on a mobile network that is dedicated to that customer,” said Didoni. “So that customer gets their own dedicated spectrum and their own dedicated cloud experience so they know that they’ve got complete control over that environment and the latency in that environment. That’s where we work with Microsoft Azure stack.”

Customers are already using Vodafone/AWS Wavelength

Vodafone and AWS are already working with some of their joint customers. One customer is Aurrigo, a company that does self-driving vehicle technology. It is using AWS Wavelength on Vodafone’s 5G network to support a new shuttle service being trialed in Cambridge, U.K. The service transfers park-and-ride customers to and from Cambridge University Science Park. 

“AWS Wavelength and Vodafone 5G and MEC technologies provide our vehicles with ultra-low latency and expansive bandwidth, which lets us monitor our autonomous vehicles in real time, via safe and secure communications,” said Simon Brewerton, chief technology officer of Aurrigo, in a statement.