SHARP ENOUGH TO SLICE?

Will edge computing help telcos increase their revenue share from the enterprise market or does it mean more struggle for them, and how?

- PRATIMA HARIGUNANI

We always had the pipe. But it took some time and a fresh pair of eyes to see that the pipe can be a wind-chime or a pair of drum-sticks too, besides being the stove accessory or an oil conduit that it was, all this time. It could do things more exciting than the dry chores it was limited to so far. It must have been many years, likewise, after a typical telco planted the network as a ‘bit pipe’ when someone came and fiddled with it to simply mutter: Hey, this can be a great digital business platform, a superb way to deliver Edge applications.

Someone else heard those words and thought, yes why not? Operators have the best spatial advantage here already. They can monetize the pipes that are already there and also offer that low-latency factor and proximity that an enterprise always wanted and has been trying to get in the form of cloud. The operators can easily offer compute, storage and connectivity to their customers with their existing local footprint/real estate and the unique last-mile position for the depth and speed that such applications need.

And so arrived (drum-roll): Edge computing. A unique stripe of computing that helps a telco to provide distributed computing and storage resources very close to the location where they are needed for specific application use cases. It enables them to bring some cloud capabilities like computing, storage and networking physically closer to the user by the sheer proximity of location of a widely distributed compute infrastructure.