Vodafone has officially opened its Edge Innovation Lab in MediaCity, offering Manchester the opportunity to create a global leadership position in the technology community. The lab itself will focus on a technology called Multi-access Edge Compute (known as MEC for short) and the new services which it will enable. MEC lowers the latency of applications, which means they become more responsive.
It effectively brings the power of 5G and the cloud closer to the people using it in a more economical way. This could mean mobile gaming with zero lag or bufferless video streaming experiences. It could also mean bringing to life ideas that would otherwise be impossible to deliver otherwise. In the future, combining MEC technology with 5G could mean applications respond faster than the human brain processes information. This near-real time responsiveness of applications will allow for new services to become much more commonplace.
Andrea Dona, Chief Network Officer at Vodafone, says: “Imagine drone delivery of packages. Autonomous vehicles. Virtual and augmented reality experiences on your mobile. Expert surgeons could assist procedures, giving direction through holograms or haptic suits in real-time from the other side of the country.
