Edge is not imminent as latency is already improving as per T-Mobile executive.

"Edge compute is early days from my perspective," said T-Mobile's Dave Mayo, SVP of the carrier's 5G and IoT businesses. Mayo spoke here at the FierceWireless Next Gen Wireless Networks Summit. "It's not as imminent as maybe the hype cycle will suggest."

Mayo first explained that the latency available on LTE networks is already as low as 20 ms, and he said that figure could decline to 5-10 ms on 5G networks. He said those latency speeds will be suitable for most applications in the near term. (Latency is the time it takes a byte to traverse a network—like when you say, "hey Alexa" and it responds with a "yes?")

"The need to broadly deploy edge compute diminishes" as those latency speeds decline.

However, Mayo said that some select applications could make use of edge computing capabilities in the next few years. Specifically, he pointed to oil and gas operations, where providers might need local computing capabilities in order to keep all their data local to a specific geographic location.

"That's a great use case where edge compute is absolutely required," he noted.

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