5G MEC use cases:
How can businesses
leverage 5G
and MEC?

Picture yourself at a football game where your favorite player scores a touchdown. You immediately look up to the video screen to see a number of replays from various angles, all controlled by an operator with multi-cam viewing. Later, you use your phone to find a cashierless concession stand with minimal traffic—and then again to check out from the stand. When you leave the game, you use your phone once more to direct you to the closest bathroom or your parking spot. Stadium operators are starting to use 5G and MEC (multi-access edge computing) integration to develop this kind of enhanced customer experience in the hopes of generating increased revenues.

MEC brings the tasks of computing and decision-making to the edge of the network, away from centralized cloud servers. In this case, the edge could be accessed by thousands, if not millions, of mobile devices. In fact, the number of devices using edge computing is expected to increase from 2.7 billion to 7.8 billion from 2020 to 2030, according to Transforma Insights. Through distributed cloud, MEC enables data processing at the edge. It saves time by not having to push data back and forth to a distant data center and, therefore, decreases latency in operations. Computing could be near instantaneous, which could help enable faster reactions to related insights.

The 5G network can support an infrastructure that facilitates MEC. Merging the two delivers a whole host of technological impacts that potentially translate into some key benefits for enterprises.

• Ultra-low latency: The potential for ultra-low latency, the time it takes to transmit and receive data, could enable near-immediate action at the edge. Such immediacy could help to improve the performance of applications.
• IoT enablement: Successful deployment of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) networks depends not just on gathering relevant data at the edge, but also being able to act on generated insights through connected devices.

Businesses have opportunities to leverage 5G and MEC to drive sales, improve the customer experience, optimize operations and create new opportunities for growth. Here are a few 5G MEC use cases in different industries:

As the stadium football game example illustrates, the combination of 5G and MEC can help deliver better fan experiences and may offer new opportunities for revenue generation. 5G and MEC also can play a key role in enhancing and elevating the fan experience and can help venues innovate around public safety, access, concessions, crowd management, and operations.

5G and MEC can help enable the delivery of enhanced personalized content at scale is also helpful in retail. Stores can lean on proximity sensors to push out sales and deliver notifications in real time through mobile devices to customers who opt into receiving such notifications. Retailers can also create immersive experiences and implement product tracking and consumer responses at more granular levels. Understanding what motivates a consumer to buy in real time is valuable information for retailers.

Healthcare applications that 5G and MEC could help enable include near real-time, edge-based AI inferencing systems that can help detect things the human eye cannot. This could help support more accurate diagnostics and enable practitioners to properly diagnose medical conditions and intervene appropriately. 5G and MEC could also help support AI-driven video analytics in the operating room to help support surgical counts and techniques, and help monitor out-of-the-way areas of the hospital to alert staff regarding falls, emergency vehicle arrival or activity in secure locations.