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U.S. telco pledges to bring the cloud to its customers with SDN, ultrafast access infrastructure.
AT&T this week talked up its edge computing credentials in a bid to position itself to capitalise on future demand for low latency services like self-driving cars, and augmented reality and virtual reality (A/VR).
The U.S. telco noted that services like these require a huge amount of near-real time computation. Some of it will be carried out by the device itself and won’t need network connectivity, but a lot of it, particularly in the case of AR, will need a highly-responsive connection to the cloud.
"Edge computing fulfils the promise of the cloud to transcend the physical constraints of our mobile devices," said Andre Fuetsch, AT&T’s chief technology officer, on Tuesday.
AT&T said its software-defined networking (SDN) and FlexWare network functions virtualisation (NFV) will help it to push more computational power from data centres out to base stations, central offices, and small cells – i.e., towards the edge of the network – much closer to the end user’s terminal, whether that is a phone, car or pair of AR glasses.
"Few companies have the sheer number of physical locations that AT&T has that are needed to solve the latency dilemma," Fuetsch said.
Further down the line, 5G access networks will provide an ultrafast connection from the device to that edge computing infrastructure, said AT&T.
"The capabilities of tomorrow’s 5G are the missing link that will make edge computing possible," said Fuetsch.
AT&T said it plans to publish a white paper in the coming weeks that discusses how to apply edge computing to enable mobile augmented and virtual reality technology.
"We think edge computing will drive a wave of innovation unlike anything seen since the dawn of the Internet itself," AT&T said.
