Man-of-Leisure Some cable providers migrating to DAA are using the newly freed up space, power, and HVAC capacity to be other services providers data center space, but much more local to customers than the bigger regional data centers. It’s edge computing realized. Moving cloud servers closer to the edge. It won’t be the end users paying them, at least not directly. They’ll pay for it through their streaming video, game provider, and other cloud based service fees that make up that 70% of usage.
Comcast has put out joint press releases about it:
https://corporate.comcast.com/press/releases/comcast-edge-compute-enhance-streaming-experience-standardized-platform-content-delivery-network
Comcast is leveraging edge compute technology to put more computing power closer to consumers to deliver a better Internet experience for applications like streaming and gaming and to develop a standardized platform for providers to distribute their content across Comcast’s network.
The company will deploy Qwilt’s Open Edge platform, creating the most distributed content delivery network (CDN) in the U.S.
Chris Winfrey of Charter mentioned edge computing space in their hubs at a tech invester confrence a few months back as well: https://seekingalpha.com/article/4720534-charter-communications-inc-chtr-goldman-sachs-communacopia-technology-conference-transcript
Edge compute, when you think about our network, the distributed nature of our network, we have fiber powering right away, everywhere we operate, everybody knows that. But we actually have low latency, high compute capabilities at a local level through all the hubs and head-ends that we have. These hubs and head-ends are much more localized than other competitive networks. And they’re freeing up in terms of space because of the high split upgrade that we’re doing is taking what used to be big racks of integrated CMTS and moving those out to a software-based CMTS.
Now it’s more information you asked for. But all you need to know is that we are clearing out vast swaths of space inside of our hubs and head ends for that are ready to go to put in third-party equipment as needed with cooling space and all that equipment ready to have, when the edge compute demand and product really results. Again, none of that’s inside of our business plan because predicting when customers are going to need that and exactly how we’ll look, it’s still a little bit hard to find.
Cisco’s put out multiple papers on it, like this one among others: https://www.nctatechnicalpapers.com/Paper/2019/2019-cable-edge-compute-transforming-cable-hubs-into-application-centric-cloud
The mobile industry has popularized and has already started embracing the concept of Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC). Clearly, the same concept can be applied to cable networks to benefit wide range of use-cases, especially the ones that are latency or bandwidth sensitive. This concept drives placing time sensitive applications e.g. IoT and/or bandwidth hungry applications e.g. CDN/cache at the network edge or Hub sites, closer to the customer. There is a tremendous opportunity for Cable MSOs in transforming their Hub sites into Next Gen Application-Centric Cloud sites.
Others over the years have put out papers on it, but it was a bit early as the resources weren’t really available yet and were then delayed a few years by the demands of Covid.
https://www.cablelabs.com/blog/moving-beyond-cloud-computing-to-edge-computing
