Why Cell Towers are the Next Frontier for Edge Computing
The max speed of the first Ford Model T was 28mph; the 2017 Ford GT goes 216mph. In 1903, about 32,000 cars were registered to ride on only a few hundreds of miles of roads. Today, over 250 million vehicles traverse 164,000 miles of U.S. highways. Similarly, the information highway has grown from the 56 Kbps worldwide web of the ‘90s supporting about half a million users to today’s billions of users and connected IoT devices and speeds claimed up to 50Mbps and even 1Gbps. That’s why cell towers are the next frontier for edge computing. They are part of the edge in totality, which we’ve defined as not a location per se , but an application. Edge could be a hospital operating room, an industrial factory or a distribution waypoint on a fiber route in the form of a micro data center. All these places are edgy; some are more mature than others, with the cell tower edge being nascent. More Speed The cell tower edge is an emerging, consumer-driven space with content providers standing to b...