BT’s Mark Toman, trailing trusted, sovereign MEC service launches for 2026.
In March 2023, BT announced that it would be making a multi-million pound investment to combine its 4G and 5G network with AWS Wavelength services, with the aim of providing mobile edge computing infrastructure for business applications.
It opened up a Wavelength site in Manchester, and said a chief driver would be low-latency and high-speed services, such as wearable cameras for paramedics and ambulance staff, cameras for police to provide instant replay and higher-grade footage, and ‘frictionless retail’, enabling shoppers to buy without the need to scan, queue, or check out.
With this launch site providing services across a 100km radius, BT stated its aim was to “roll out AWS Wavelength to business customers across the UK more broadly in the coming years”.
Nearly three years later, BT still has one AWS Wavelength site, in Manchester, as it did at launch. But it insists it has now built a surrounding service architecture that will enable it to start monetising that investment.
Our thinking was let’s align with AWS and let’s move forward. But what we discovered quite quickly is it wasn’t the AWS that we needed to change, it was actually the network
BT Wholesale’s Client Director, Mark Toman, has told TMN that the company will have an edge-based public safety service rolled out in Q1 next year. It will also have a commercial, cloud-based camera-as-a-service solution publicly available by the middle of 2026, following customer pilots over the past 12 months. The company is also looking at healthcare and manufacturing use cases, Toman said.
That said, Toman admits that building up service rollouts using the Wavelength edge capability has been a slow burn. There are no current plans to rollout more Wavelength sites – if they do then it will be more about providing redundancy and resiliency for critical services.
“It’s been quite a nascent market,” he says. “and I think we’re actually one of the first movers with our partnership with AWS.” [Vodafone Business has two sites with AWS Wavelength, starting since 2021]
“I’ve been living and breathing this for three years. We had a build it and they will come type approach [at first]. Our thinking was let’s align with AWS and let’s move forward. But what we discovered quite quickly is it wasn’t the AWS that we needed to change, it was actually the network, and the driving factor was all the network components.”
Toman says BT has spent the past three years building an advanced 5G network to support edge computing, as well as changing the way BT supports the service. So the company has deployed its 5G SA core from Ericsson, and worked on virtualising the network, moving to a licensing model with suppliers such as Juniper (now part of HPE). Any member of staff with access to service data has also been on-shored and security cleared – and that has also extended to those working on the 5G network, “where appropriate”.
Everyone talks about AR, driverless cars. We parked that a long time ago.
The driver in that change of approach has been a re-appraisal of customer use cases.
“I‘ve been out speaking to customers, trying to understand the problems that we can solve, where this actually fits in, what will they pay and what will drive them to these edge based service where can we charge those premiums?”
“Everyone talks about AR, driverless cars. We parked that a long time ago. We’re now working on real use cases. So health and public safety where real time communication is important, where inference is absolutely critical. We want to move from collecting evidence to being able to prevent accidents and incidents from happening.”
Lower latency, Toman says, is not really the key driver, or at least not enough to make a difference to drive service adoption. In a small country like the UK, people just expect it anyway. Instead, the bigger drivers have been trust, security and sovereignty.
In Toman’s words, BT is building the cloud compute and owning it directly into the BT network.
“We can control all the packets, understand where they are, and that is what we mean by sovereignty – built, managed and secured in the UK.”
Toman says that opens up a raft of new use cases that previously weren’t possible.
“That’s what we’ve been working on, making sure that there’s a quality of service so that if you’re if you’re working on these edge based systems, then you will actually get a quality of service that works.”
Toman describes the new architecture as a hybrid one, with both fixed and mobile networks connecting into the Wavelength zone. Customers can keep on-prem computing but where appropriate move to the network edge and open up mobility use cases.
For its public sector network launch, the service runs on BT’s public network but none of the packets touch the internet.
“We can monitor and audit every packet end-to-end.When we talk about sovereignty, it’s not just about building your data centre in the UK. It’s about actually understanding where that data is at any given point, and that was a really important thing as we’ve moved into a more sovereign environment.”
If you can’t get your costs structured right, you can never bring anything market. And I think that’s been a huge challenge for edge in general.”
Adoption challenge
Some of the adoption challenges have been more market-based. Non-technology companies find the whole area confusing – working out their digital architecture, and a cloud strategy. Additionally, a lot of business 5G devices don’t connect natively to the 5G SA network, so BT had to put in place capabilities with Ericsson Cradlepoint to connect those devices.
Taking care of the complexity and architectural challenge has been key for Toman.
“One of the things I was really intent on doing was making sure that after all the hard work that has gone into architecting the network, we could replicate that for other use cases and try to remove that challenge for businesses. So we’ve got all the core components. You then put your developer or your platform on top of it, and you can just wrap it how you want – and we take care of all the hard stuff.”
BT Wholesale has also been working on financial barriers, to find cost and price points that work for customers.
“That’s actually been one of the biggest challenges of bringing it all together – making sure that you can work with the customer, identify a cost envelope that this use case needs to sit in, and then work backwards across the network.
“It’s not just the 5G component and the AWS compute, there’s the developer, there’s all the other pieces as well. So all the licenses with the manufacturers, whether it’s Juniper, Ericsson or others. You’ve got to bring that together, because if you can’t get your costs structured right, you can never bring anything market. And I think that’s been a huge challenge for edge in general.”
The rise of AI
Toman adds that other big change in the last three years has been the rise of AI. He says that while few could have predicted the speed at which AI would take off, BT’s network infrastructure was deliberately designed to support evolving technologies, such as AI.
Toman sees the opportunity in anything that has inference to it, so anytime that is a decision made in milliseconds. As we move away from an advisory type scenario into active decision making, you’d be able to have those AI functions operating at the edge in real time. So the where we see opportunity is definitely in public safety, health, and we’re talking about manufacturing as well.”
The rise of AI may also drive the need for a more distributed infrastructure – and that might in turn drive more localised instances of edge compute.
“One of the big challenges, especially in the UK, is that a lot of these big data centers need 100 megawatts, and there’s just not 100 megawatts available. So you get into a distributed architecture and into a cluster-type model. There’s a lot that we’re looking at now – can you actually build clusters that look and feel like a single data center for AI type workloads?”
