Telefónica has notched a third deployment of edge nodes in its home country of Spain with a recent launch in Seville, Spain.
The telco's virtual data center edge service (VDC-Edge) in Seville, which was announced last week, joined previous deployments of edge nodes in Madrid and Barcelona. Given the large amount of fiber it has deployed, as well as its large number of central offices, Telefónica said it was well positioned to offer low latency services and applications from the edge nodes.
RELATED: Lumen Technologies turns up the first block of its cloud edge nodes in the third quarter
Lumen Technologies, which was formerly CenturyLink, has a similar edge node play in place. In 2019, Lumen said it had more than 100 edge compute nodes across the U.S., but it's in the process of adding 150 more around the globe.
In its recent third quarter, Lumen turned up its first block of cloud edge nodes as part of its cloud edge strategy. Lumen also is in the process of adding customers.
Telefónica's edge compute nodes connect directly to the optical fiber that reaches homes and mobile base stations, which it said reduces network elements and speeds up computing at a terminal at a cost that's similar to conventional cloud solutions.
“Edge computing provides a unique opportunity to bring the latest technology to all areas of society, enabling in regional locations capabilities previously only available in large centralized data centers. Thus, strategic sectors for the Andalusian economy such as tourism, aeronautics, ag-food and ports can significantly improve their competitiveness and create new and differential solutions," said Emilio Torres, head of VDC and hosting at Telefónica Tech, in a statement.
Edge compute services include 5 millisecond transport times from existing locations to the edge, which is ideal for low latency applications such as virtual reality, augmented reality, machine learning, medical imaging, 8K, Internet of Things and artificial intelligence (AI.)
By bringing compute and other capabilities to the edge, service providers and businesses can move infrastructure from centralized locations to the edges, and run applications closer to end users, which lowers latency and optimizes operations.
With low latency edge compute and the cloud, Telefónica's customers get the benefits of on prem deployments without the need for data and applications traveling to and from data centers.
Telefónica's VDC-Edge is an evolution of Telefónica's VDC services that it has offered over the past eight years under the infrastructure-as-a- service (IaaS) model.
RELATED: Move over Microsoft: Google Cloud ties into Spain's Telefónica for cloud and 5G edge use cases
Earlier this year, Telefónica announced cloud partnerships with both Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. In its press release, Telefónica didn't say if it was using Google Cloud or Azure for its VDC-Edge deployments.
RELATED: AT&T and Google Cloud forge 5G edge compute partnership for enterprises
Telefónica and Google previously announced they would jointly develop a portfolio of solutions for 5G using Google Cloud's mobile edge computing platform, which is similar to Google Cloud and AT&T's announcement in March for 5G edge compute use cases for enterprises.