Thursday, May 5, 2016

MEC: The 7B$ opportunity

Extracted from Mobile Edge Computing 2016.
Table of contents



Defining an addressable market for an emerging product or technology is always an interesting challenge. On one hand, you have to evaluate the problems the technology solves and their value to the market, and on the other hand, appreciate the possible cost structure and psychological price expectations from the potential buyer / users.

This warrants a top down and bottoms up approach to look at how the technology can contribute or substitute some current radio and core networks spending, together with a cost based review of the potential physical and virtual infrastructure. [...]

The cost analysis is comparatively easy, as it relies on well understood current cost structure for physical hardware and virtual functions. The assumptions surrounding the costs of the hardware has been reviewed with main x86 based hardware vendors. The VNFs pricing relies on discussions with large and emerging telecom equipment vendors for standard VNFs such as EPC, IMS, encoding, load balancers, DPI… price structure. Traditional telco professional services, maintenance and support costs are apportioned and included in the calculations.

The overall assumption is that MEC will become part of the fabric of 5G networks and that MEC equipment will cover up to 20% of a network (coverage or population) when fully deployed.
The report features total addressable market, cumulative and incremental for MEC equipment vendors and integrator, broken down by CAPEX / OPEX, consumer, enterprises and IoT services.
It then provides a review of operators opportunities and revenue model for each segment.