What’s Behind AT&T’s Big Bet on Edge Computing
Hyper-scale cloud has big advantages in scale and efficiency, but for some things you need to have the computation done closer to the problem.
July 31, 2017
By Pino Vallejo
Brought to you by Data Center Knowledge
Hyper-scale cloud has big advantages in scale and efficiency, but for some things you need to have the computation done closer to the problem. That’s what AT&T is promising with its upcoming edge computing services that will put micro data centers in its central offices (think telephone exchange), cell towers, and small cells.
Eventually this edge computing network will use the future 5G standard to lower the latency even further. That will open up possibilities like using high-end GPUs AT&T says it will place at the edge of its network for highly parallel, near-real-time workloads. Take off-board rendering for augmented reality for example. Instead of rendering the overlay for AR frame by frame on your device, a cloud system that doesn’t have to worry about using up too much battery power could pre-render an entire scene and then quickly send what’s relevant as you turn your head.
“Today, one of the biggest challenges for phones running high-end VR applications is extremely short battery life due to the intense processing requirements,” an AT&T spokesperson told us. “We think this technology could play a huge role in multiple applications, from autonomous cars, to AR/VR, to robotic manufacturing and more. And we’ll use our software-defined network to manage it all, giving us a significant advantage over competitors.
More Than a Dumb Pipe to Cloud
The definition of edge computing is a little fuzzy; often it refers to aggregation points like gateways or hyperconverged micro data centers on premises, and what AT&T is promising from its tens of thousands of sites “usually never farther than a few miles from our customers” is perhaps closer to fog computing.