Vodafone has set up an edge innovation lab in partnership with the Home of Skills & Technology (Host) at MediaCity in Salford, England, so local software developers can experiment with cloud technology.

The lab is the first of its kind in the UK and is designed to help support the development of Manchester, and the surrounding region, into a digital powerhouse.

It offers the opportunity for companies, academics, software developers and public sector organisations to see and test the possibilities in multi-access edge compute (MEC) cloud technology. When deployed with 5G, developers can create applications that react faster than the human brain. These capabilities could give rise to technology use cases such as autonomous vehicles, near-real time fraud detection, and augmented and virtual reality mobile experiences.

Software developers and innovators in the Greater Manchester area will have access to these technologies in the earliest stages of development. This will create a global centre of excellence for real-time mobile applications in the region, supporting the growth of digitally led businesses and industries in the area, as well as in the rest of the UK.

“For digital to have the biggest impact on our lives, we need to put the technology in the hands of the people who will use it every day,” said Maria Grazia Pecorari, strategy and wholesale director at Vodafone. “That is the exact purpose of this lab. This is exciting for us, as it’s the first of its kind in the UK, and it’s got the potential to bring a huge amount of opportunity to the wider north west as well as Salford and Manchester.”

Demonstrations at the lab include an augmented reality experience from Tactile and Vodafone, where digital instructions and information is overlaid on the physical world through a virtual reality headset. This allows engineers to access information when repairing physical assets, as well as the opportunity for more experienced engineers to dial in to support activities and provide visual instruction in real time without lag.

“It’s fantastic to see a facility like this opening in Salford,” said Paul Dennett, city mayor of Salford. “It’s already a thriving centre for new technology and entrepreneurship and having access to the facilities at the lab will make a massive difference to local businesses and organisations across a variety of industries.”

Mo Isap, CEO of IN4 Group, the operator of Host, added: “We’re really pleased to see the vision for this lab realised, and to have been able to share it with the business and tech communities across the region. It’s now available for them to use to really test out the possibilities of the next generation of technology, and we can’t wait to see what they come up with.”

MEC is a way of delivering cloud services, bringing compute power closer to the devices that need it. Applications that power services such as visual inspection and mobile games are hosted on the cloud. This means data are processed by servers in data centres rather than on the devices themselves. The time it takes an application to respond is known as latency or buffering and can have an impact on the performance of the application. The lower the latency, the quicker the application responds.

The reason it takes some applications longer than others to respond can be where the application is hosted. Devices have to communicate with the server the application is hosted on to function, meaning the further afield the location of this data centre, the longer the response time or latency.

MEC servers are designed for low-latency applications. They are installed in data centres to reduce the physical distance and therefore time data have to travel to communicate with applications.

Applications include autonomous or semi-autonomous vehicles, defect detection on automated production lines, robotics, drone delivery, and mobile virtual, mixed or augmented reality experiences.

The Edge Innovation Programme has been running for two years and invites companies and software developers to work with Vodafone to trial ideas based on edge distributed and dedicated technologies. Any company can work with Vodafone providing the idea is commercially viable.

For distributed edge, companies can run trials at a discounted rate for up to eight weeks in one of the two AWS Wavelength zones in London and Greater Manchester. For dedicated edge, companies can run trials for up to three days using a specialist server that has been installed at the Salford laboratory.