back to article European Telecoms Standards Institute emits mobile edge APIs

The European Telecommunications Standards Institute has unveiled the first APIs created under its Multi-Access Edge Computing project. The name of the multi-access edge (MEC) game is to open up computing in mobile base stations to third-party developers. The API releases cover mobile edge services, application lifecycle …

  1. John Smith 19 Gold badge
    FAIL

    By all means, let's expand the users attact surface exponentially

    For malware to infect mobiles.

    For snoopers (both govt and non govt) to install tracking networks.

    Let's require every radio mast to need a data centre sitting at its base.

    I wonder how many end users (bill payers) want any of this?

    1. steelpillow Silver badge

      Re: By all means, let's expand the users attact surface exponentially

      Hey, you beat me to it. Let's run a sweepstake on when they host their first DDOS attack.

      But you know what users are like, "Hey, that improves usability. Uh... no, I don't know how to spell security, don't be so...."

      Still, until AI gets better at cybersecurity than humans, some of us will always live in an expanding jobs market. :)

      1. John Smith 19 Gold badge
        Unhappy

        " Let's run a sweepstake on when they host their first DDOS attack."

        I doubt it would be longer than days, weeks at the most, after enough of these go live.

        I just don't get the "use case" for this.

        Yes there is stuff an end supplier would like to know about the caller. But I find it hard to picture a situation so time critical that you need the suppliers code running on base station hardware to supply a response quickly enough to be useful.

        The speed of light is quite high, even in a coax cable.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    We did something suspiciously similar at Ubiquisys 5 years ago when Intel were tapping us up for our small cell knowledge. Interesting how Lawful Intercept wasn't mentioned much here, but it was definitely a big thing then as something not entering the core network still needed to be rounded up.

    Nothing new under the sun...

  3. John Smith 19 Gold badge
    Unhappy

    "interesting how Lawful Intercept wasn't mentioned much here,"

    "Lawful intercept" AFAIK is built into the GSM standards anyway.

    The question is does that include requiring an authorization mechanism and an audit trailing system (IE and authorization token of some kind, and a unique ID of who issued it) as well?

POST COMMENT House rules

Not a member of The Register? Create a new account here.

  • Enter your comment

  • Add an icon

Anonymous cowards cannot choose their icon