American Tower and Crown Castle both exploring colocation of edge computing appliances at cell tower sites
Latency-dependent services command not just network densification, but also distribution of data center-type compute and storage functionality to the network edge. In the telecom industry, edge computing is certainly a going concern particularly as it relates to the support for massive internet of things implementations and mission critical communications, both major 5G use cases. But the process of deploying edge equipment is, among many things, a complex real estate equation–think of the lessons learned related to small cell densification efforts. In short, we know we need edge computing but where will the necessary infrastructure go?
Wireless infrastructure provider Crown Castle has some 40,000 cell towers in the U.S., with more than 70% in major markets, and American Tower has more than 27,000 domestic tower sites. With that kind of real estate reach, not to mention ready access to power and backhaul, it’s clear why both companies are looking for new opportunities related to edge computing.
Jennifer Fritzsche, senior analyst at Equity Research, met on May 10 with American Tower CFO John Bartlett. According to a research note from Fritzsche, the company is “in thinking ‘outside the box’ mode” as it looks to create new revenue streams. “While still early on,” Fritzsche wrote, “edge computing was mentioned.” She said American tower has 3,000-square-feet of space on property it either owns or has a long term lease. “As networks needs change this could be used in different ways including points of edge connections.”
The evolution from LTE to LTE-Advanced to LTE-Advanced Pro and on to 5G certainly means much higher network capacity, but there’s also a continuous decline in latency. In the context of emerging applications like mobile AR or autonomous driving, latency is key. And this further highlights the important role of edge computing.
Jay Brown, CEO of Crown Castle, hit on this in a Q4 2017 earnings call earlier this year. “The development of future technologies has the potential to further extend the runway of growth. Emerging technologies including 5G, autonomous vehicles, augmented or virtual reality and internet of things applications will require mission critical network infrastructure that provides availability anywhere at any time on any device.” Noting latency and density needs, Brown said, “With our distributed real estate…we believe Crown Castle is in a unique position to benefit from these trends longer-term.”
In addition to the siting component, Crown Castle has also invested in an Austin, Texas-based firm, Vapor IO, which is keenly focused on edge computing. Vapor IO produces the Vapor Edge Module, designed for multi-tenancy edge processing, and last year Crown Castle made an investment in the firm.
When Crown made the investment last year, Vapor IO CEO Cole Crawford said, “By locating Vapor IO’s technology at tower locations and connecting to dense metro fiber, we will provide the fastest, most economical way for cloud providers, telecom carriers and web-scale companies to deliver next generation edge services in every major U.S. city.”
Speaking of the Vapor IO deal, Brown said on the call, “We’re continuing to do some work and trials at the edge. A part of that is driven by the need to push computing power to the very edge of the network. we’re continuing to see opportunities to trial activities and learn about that business. We believe that part of the driver of the devices that are going to be used…the latency required in order to make those devices work effectively is going to require not only high speed fiber, dense fiber networks and close proximity to the locations where the RF is distributed…but it’s also going to require computing power. We’re continuing to work on that. We believe that will be a long-term driver of the need for our infrastructure. We’re still int the learning and trial phase.”
On the carrier side, AT&T sees edge computing is a key part of supporting IoT, software-defined networking, blockchain, artificial intelligence and 5G. AT&T Vice President of Intelligent Edge Josh Goodell said the aforementioned technologies are all “essential to the future of the customer experience and back-end business operations–require massive amounts of near real-time computation. Edge-to-edge intelligence is poised to help make this computation possible, and make seamless user experiences a reality.”
Goodell likened the move of compute to the network edge as making “it feel like every device is a supercomputer. Digital processes become lightning fast. Critical data is processed [at]the edge of the network, right on the device. Secondary systems and less urgent data are sent to the cloud and processed there. With SDN, organizations have more flexibility to define rules on where and how data is processed to optimize application performance and user experience.”
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