How TIP can realise the promise of Edge Compute

Intel sees the Telecom Infra Project (TIP) as an natural evolution of the work being done with NFV and SDN, driving the next step in the evolution of the telco industry as it becomes more cloud native. It sees the success of the Facebook-led Open Compute Platform (OCP) and believes TIP will be just as effective. The company is a founding Board member of TIP and co-chairs the OpenRAN and Edge Compute project groups, as well as participating in the mmWave and AI groups.

Caroline Chan believes the industry now has the potential to change what was originally a single focus cellular network into the multi-purpose network of the future, serving multiple verticals, and that's where Edge Compute comes into play. Although today it's still at the PoC and user trial stage, with few commercial deployments, she hopes telcos will recognise the potential of the network edge and will roll out edge computing right across the network, with comprehensive coverage, to facilitate more use cases and business models. Operators have already spent huge sums of money at the edge of their networks, with thousands of cell towers and sites, so edge compute is a means for operators to monetise something they already have - location.

Filmed at: TIP Summit, November 2017, Santa Clara