Comcast (NASDAQ: CMCSA) teamed with mini data center company Vapor IO on a pilot of last mile edge services in two cities. Elad Nafshi, Comcast’s chief network officer, told Silverlinings the move will help the cable company learn more about cloud technology and flesh out its long-term edge strategy.
The pilot will leverage Vapor IO’s Kinetic Grid infrastructure – which is a network of mini data centers scattered across the U.S. – in two cities: Chicago and Atlanta. Though Vapor IO’s data centers are available in seven cities, Nafshi said it chose those two because it wanted to run the pilot in markets which are large enough and representative enough so that it can draw conclusions about what works and what doesn’t. The pilots are set to go live in Q3 2023.
Comcast already uses edge computing to run its virtual cable modem termination system (vCMTS). The vCMTS is essentially the bridge between the internet and last mile users, enabling the exchange and routing of digital signals. This used to be done with physical hardware, but Comcast switched to a virtual CMTS five or so years ago, which enables workloads to be processed in the cloud.
Its pilot with Vapor IO, however, will allow it to explore new, customer-facing edge use cases. In particular, it can look at as-a-service offerings such as computer vision as a service, video security as a service and private 5G as a service.
“It’s a whole new category of services, it’s a whole new opportunity for us,” Nafshi said. “One of the things we’re looking to learn from this pilot is what works. Before we start to embed this edge compute or that edge compute, what is the product offering that customers actually want, demand, depend on, and then how do they want that structured, what are the applications it needs to run, what kind of performance are we looking at, and so on and so forth.”
The answers to these questions, he added, will allow Comcast to make informed decisions about its long-term edge compute strategy, including what types of customers and industries it should target.
Asked whether Comcast might expand its pilot beyond Chicago and Atlanta to some of the other seven cities where Vapor IO operates or the 30 or so it has plans to deploy in, Nafshi said it’s too early to tell.
Bringing in the big guns
Comcast isn’t the only operator getting into the edge compute game. Verizon has been working with Amazon Web Services for years to offer 5G mobile edge computing services, though executives said earlier this year that the technology was gaining traction with customers “a little slower than maybe we would have liked.”
Meanwhile, AT&T has edge collaboration deals with Microsoft and Google Cloud. T-Mobile is also working on edge solutions with Google Cloud, Lumen Technologies and Dell.
Comcast doesn't appear to have struck any such long term agreements. At this point, it's not yet clear whether it, too, will end up partnering with the big guns.