EdgeQ: Inventing new paradigm for 5G wireless infrastructure

5G is the new buzzword in the telecom industry that is expected to transform the sector immensely. The technology has brought forth a plethora of opportunities for multiple players. EdgeQ is one such player that is riding on the 5G wave. The company is unifying 5G hardware and software in an open and programmable manner that enables and empowers its customers. Hariprasad G, head of silicon engineering and India country manager, EdgeQ, talks about key trends in the telecom space and the company’s key offerings in the 5G space…..

What are some of the notable trends you are observing in the global telecom space? How are you helping your customers address these?

5G is generating a lot of interest, because it is revolutionary from multiple perspectives. We expect seismic shifts in terms of its transformational properties, particularly from enterprise, industrial, and telco sectors. We expect innovations and disruptions in terms of network topology and architecture. And most profoundly, we expect new players, new entrants supplying network connectivity for the first time.

Then key aspect to consider is, how do you productize 5G infrastructure against a massive landscape – with many different performance and feature requirements, with many different power and cost points, and with many different workloads and use cases? At EdgeQ, we want to create a 5G platform composed of chip hardware and software that allows fluidity, elasticity, and scale for our customers as they migrate through new spectrums, new standards and new end points.

What are the key focus areas of EdgeQ? What are your core offerings in the 5G cellular space?

Our vision is to reconstitute the wireless infrastructure in a manner that is intelligent, agile, and cloud-native.  We want to lower the barrier to entry and deployment of 5G. Our approach is to unify 5G hardware and software in an open and programmable manner that enables and empowers new customers, new players and new providers to deploy 5G in a massive and differentiated manner.

What we are designing is the world’s first software-defined 5G Base Station-on-a-Chip, where customers for the first time have the ability to gain access to 5G algorithms via APIs to enable targeted customization and value added services.

Could you give us a brief description of EdgeQ’s business model? What is EdgeQ’s go-to-market strategy?

EdgeQ is inventing a new paradigm for 5G wireless infrastructure. Our customers are developing enterprise-grade 5G small cells (access points) and Open-Radio Access Network (O-RAN) based Radio Unit (RU) and Distributed Unit (DU).

But this is just the first wave of our applicability in the 5G space. Because of the software-defined nature of our 5G platform, our design and architecture is optimized to natively scale down to new end client applications – such as cars, drones, cameras, gateways, sensors, etc. So the opportunities are immense.

What are the company’s flagship innovations? How are these innovations helping telecom customers as well as end-users of mobile telephony?

Traditional market approaches offer baseband processing hardware and PHY software as separate topics, where the burden of proof rests on customers to fully productize and enable. We have the ability and completeness to accelerate the market with a production-grade 5G Radio Software stack that is also customizable and programmable.

The prerequisite to lowering the 5G entry barrier is enabling operators and organizations with a total turnkey solution that is at the same time agile, flexible, and complete. And that’s exactly what EdgeQ is focused on.

What are EdgeQ’s key plans/offerings for the Indian market?

Firstly, we have been blessed to have a very talented and exceptional design team in our Bangalore office. This team has been instrumental in launching some of the most transformational, market-shaping technologies globally – such as 4G/5G, WiFi, WiMax, and AI. Many hail from the very top universities in India. We remain very committed and invested to grow our engineering talent at our Bangalore design center.

From a market potential perspective, we see some unique market dynamics in India relative to 5G. There is a tremendous opportunity. We anticipate a leapfrog strategy where telco carriers will be motivated to leverage Open-RAN to accelerate 5G deployment. But rather than relying on traditional suppliers and approaches, the carriers will look to a more open ecosystem driven by innovations that enable smaller, lighter, cheaper cells at the edge. And we are uniquely positioned for this seismic shift.

Why is EdgeQ’s partnership with Oracle of strategic importance to the company?

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) has afforded us the ability to execute on our 5G vision with customer-centric services, uncompromising performance and a friendly business model.  Moving to a cloud-based design has enabled us to parse and deconstruct our complex chip design into malleable bits. It allowed us to parallelize our design and integrate back in a seamless fashion. This is all necessary as we can operate as a unified organization, while executing to a very tight runway with constrained resources.

Please outline some quantitative business benefits/metrics you have achieved so far and/or you anticipate over the next couple of years using OCI. How has using OCI helped you improve what you deliver and how you deliver to your own customers?

By moving to OCI, we have gained 50 percent cost savings, while realizing high performance. Plus the unique benefits of locality, breadth of technology, and reduced duplication of data per server has helped a global matrixed organization like EdgeQ to synthesize a complex design across many of our design teams.

In summary, OCI has given us the velocity and success in the simulation, emulation, and verification of our world’s first 5G base station-on-a-chip. As innovators, we lean on cloud services that deliver: (a) breadth and depth of technological offerings; (b) scale; (c) an accommodating business model, and (d) unfailing support that simplifies and exemplifies good business.

Tell us about EdgeQ’s digital innovation roadmap for the next 12 months.

We anticipate 2022 to be the breakout year for EdgeQ where market shaping customers in enterprise, telco and cloud all start deploying next-generation 5G wireless infrastructure premises on software programmability and customization.