“Our network consists of over 5,000 central offices, over 65,000 cell towers, and even several hundred thousand distribution points beyond that, reaching into all the neighborhoods we serve,” says Andre Fuetsch, CTO at AT&T. “All of a sudden, all those physical locations become candidates for compute.” AT&T claims it has a head start on rival telecoms because of its “network virtualization initiative,” which includes the software capability to automatically juggle workloads and make good use of idle resources in the mobile network, according to Fuetsch. It’s similar to how big data centers use virtualization to spread out a customer’s data processing workload across multiple computer servers. Meanwhile, companies such as Packet might be able to piggyback their own machines onto the new facilities, too. ”I think we’re at this time where a huge amount of investment is going into mobile networks over the next two to three years,” Packet’s Smith says. “So it’s a good time to say ‘Why not tack on some compute?’” (Packet’s own funding comes in part from the giant Japanese telecom and internet conglomerate Softbank, which invested $9.4 million in 2016.) In July 2017, Packet announced its expansion to Ashburn, Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, and Seattle, along with new international locations in Frankfurt, Toronto, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Sydney. Packet is far from the only startup making claims on the edge. Austin-based Vapor IO has already begun building its own micro data centers alongside existing cell towers. In June, the startup announced its “Project Volutus” initiative, which includes a partnership with Crown Castle, the largest US provider of shared wireless infrastructure (and a Vapor IO investor). That enables Vapor IO to take advantage of Crown Castle’s existing network of 40,000 cell towers and 60,000 miles of fiber optic lines in metropolitan areas. The startup has been developing automated software to remotely operate and monitor micro data centers to ensure that customers don’t experience interruptions in service if some computer servers go down, says Cole Crawford, Vapor IO’s founder and CEO. Don’t look for the edge to shut down all those data centers in Oregon, North Carolina, and other rural outposts: Our era’s digital cathedrals are not vanishing anytime soon. Edge computing’s vision of having “thousands of small, regional and micro-regional data centers that are integrated into the last mile networks” is actually a “natural extension of today’s centralized cloud,” Crawford says. In fact, the cloud computing industry has extended its tentacles toward the edge with content delivery networks such as Akamai, Cloudflare, and Amazon CloudFront that already use “edge locations” to speed up delivery of music and video streaming. Nonetheless, the remote computing industry stands on the cusp of a “back to the future” moment, according to Peter Levine, general partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. In a 2016 video presentation, Levine highlighted how the pre-2000 internet once relied upon a decentralized network of PCs and client servers. Next, the centralized network of the modern cloud computing industry really took off, starting around 2005. Now, demand for edge computing is pushing development of decentralized networks once again (even as the public cloud computing industry’s growth is expected to peak at 18 percent this year, before starting to taper off). That kind of abstract shift is already showing up, unlocking experiences that could only exist with help from the edge. Hatch, a spinoff company from Angry Birds developer Rovio, has begun rolling out a subscription game streaming service that allows smartphone customers to instantly begin playing without waiting on downloads. The service offers low-latency multiplayer and social gaming features such as sharing gameplay via Twitch-style live-streaming. Hatch has been cagey about the technology it developed to slash the number of data-processing steps in streaming games, other than saying it eliminates the need for video compression and can do mobile game streaming at 60 frames per second. But when it came to figuring out how to transmit and receive all that data without latency wrecking the experience, Hatch teamed up with—guess who—Packet. “We are one of the first consumer-facing use cases for edge computing,” says Juhani Honkala, founder and CEO of Hatch. “But I believe there will be other use cases that can benefit from low latency, such as AR/VR, self-driving cars, and robotics.” Of course, most Hatch customers will not know or care about how those micro datacenters allow them to instantly play games with friends. The same blissful ignorance will likely surround most people who stream augmented-reality experiences on their smartphones while riding in self-driving cars 10 years from now. All of us will gradually come to expect new computer-driven experiences to be made available anywhere instantly—as if by magic. But in this case, magic is just another name for putting the right computer in the right place at the right time. “There is so much more that people can do,” says Packet’s Smith, “than stare at their smartphones and wait for downloads to happen.” We want our computation now. And the edge is the way we’ll get it.
US start-ups Packet and Vapor IO are betting that the model of huge out-of-town datacentres will soon become outdated - and that their own micro datacentres will be the bridge to the future. The standard 100 millisecond latency time for data requests will not likely be tolerated by self-driving cars and mixed-reality smartphone applications, which need a delay closer to the seven milliseconds of human eye-head coordination if perceivable lag is to be avoided. But even with this delay, there could still be significant benefits in terms of speed and reliability.