Wanted – more Euro sovereign edge telcos

• A group of five major European telcos is developing a federated edge platform across the continent
• The aim is to meet the national and regional sovereign tech needs of the continent’s enterprises and governments
• Having previously unveiled their European Edge Continuum plans, the telco quintet is now eager to get more partners on board

How many telcos does it take to develop a meaningful regional, sovereign federated edge platform in Europe? The answer, it seems, is ‘more than five’. 

A quintet of European operators – Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telecom Italia (TIM), Telefónica and Vodafone Group – is aiming to develop a regional platform that enables the seamless deployment of enterprise applications across the Europe’s borders, while processing and storing data within European Union borders, in an effort to meet the sovereign digital needs and potential low-latency requirements of the continent’s enterprises and governments. 

They made initial progress earlier this year with the unveiling of the European Edge Continuum, an initiative that built upon the work being done by the 8ra initiative – a “strategic European endeavour dedicated to establishing a resilient, open and future-proof digital infrastructure” – and, in particular, built on progress made by the initiative’s “cornerstone” effort, the Important Project of Common European Interest on Next Generation Cloud Infrastructure and Services (IPCEI-CIS).

According to the participating telcos, the European Edge Continuum “enables customers and developers to deploy applications automatically and securely across nodes from different operators, with the potential to include other major technology players in the future… [the] initiative significantly extends the reach of each operator, offering customers simple access, tight integration with the network, interoperability, data sovereignty and flexibility, which are key requirements for Europe’s digital transformation.”

That’s a great start, but while that might meet the needs of some potential users, the reach of those five telcos only goes so far. In a recently published blog, Vodafone notes that the networks of the current quintet cover about 55% of Europe’s population. 

According to María Concetta Carnuccio, manager of new services and applications at Vodafone, the initial partners are now seeking additional network operators to get involved. 

Enterprise customers, she explained, “would benefit from a unified pan-European service-level agreement, eliminating the need to negotiate individual contracts with multiple operators across different countries when, for instance, establishing a network of warehouses or factories. A company could use a domestic operator portal to oversee vehicles, robots or AI devices located in other countries through these interconnected nodes.”

According to Vodafone, a federated edge approach would “enable multinational and public-sector organisations to deploy applications consistently across multiple European countries. They would do this by leveraging local telco edge clouds under a common commercial, security and operational framework, while preserving data locality and national sovereignty.” That sovereignty is enabled by the local processing of data, as “all data and assets are kept under local EU jurisdiction. Plus, for applications like industrial robotics and autonomous vehicles that depend on instant-response networks, the few milliseconds saved can make all the difference.” 

Vodafone says it has validated the federated edge approach with its telco partners at its R&D lab in Málaga, Spain, and is now seeking to “engage with customers and partners as it moves to an experimental phase”. 

The operator adds it has identified a number of particular use cases for which the European Edge Continuum is most suited. These include:

• Retail and logistics: A multinational company could run a single logistics management application across European warehouses, ports and distribution centres using local telco edge infrastructure in each country.
   
• Industrial automation: Manufacturers could run real-time control, robotics and AI-based quality inspection on local edge sites while operating under a common service-level agreement and security model across all plants. Customers would be offered predictable performance and regulatory compliance without limiting operations to a single national network footprint.
   
• Transport: For autonomous vehicles, commercial drones and smart logistics, low-latency edge computing services would remain consistent as they move between countries. Security and policy profiles follow the workload rather than just the SIM card.
   
• Public sector and other regulated services: Emergency response platforms and cross-border health or energy systems could process data locally for sovereignty reasons while keeping applications interoperable across borders. Security would rely on common identity and trust frameworks between operators, policy-based access controls and a separation of domains so no operator cedes control of its network or customer data.

And as if to hammer home the point about the importance of regional partnerships, Carnuccio noted: “The federation is about cooperation without loss of sovereignty.”

The big question now is whether other telcos in the EU region have the resources and the will to join in and help extend the reach offered by the current participants. 

- Ray Le Maistre, Editorial Director, TelecomTV