Qualcomm has today made a number of announcements related to 5G including the introduction of the company’s new Wireless Edge Services enterprise solution. This is a product aimed primarily towards the business and enterprise sectors and one which intends to help large-scale entities deal with what will be the arrival of an exponentially large number of connected devices through the deployment of 5G and the expansion of IoT.
While this solution is generally designed with 5G in mind it is one which will also cater to 4G-enabled devices providing businesses and other organisation with the ability to mass-manage devices which make use of either technology and through one centralized product, while also utilizing a plug-and-play approach where devices can be easily added and/or removed at will. Although facilitating a one-stop solution, it should not come as too much of a surprise that security will play a pivotal role in both the deployment and adoption of Wireless Edge Services. Qualcomm has explained that in addition to already making use of robust security measures one of the additional benefits of Wireless Edge Services will be its ability to deploy fixes and patches to multiple devices simultaneously and in a more timely fashion – compared to traditional multiple device management solutions. Regardless of whether an upgrade is purely routine or sent out as an emergency measure, it can be deployed over-the-air and en masse.
From Qualcomm’s perspective, and in addition to providing its customers with a more robust solution, the company sees Wireless Edge Services as a new ‘Chipsets as a Service’ (CaaS) business model where the compatibility with certain chips will add further value to those chipsets, as well as the service in general. To begin with, Qualcomm Wireless Edge Services will be initially compatible with select Qualcomm chips and specifically ones which cater to the home IoT market (QCA4020), the industrial IoT market (MDM9206), and the automotive connected market (MDM9628). Although its support will eventually expand to include Snapdragon platforms as well. As part of the announcement, Qualcomm confirmed it is anticipating support for Wireless Edge Services to start in the second half of this year.