Colby Synesael, Cowen’s Communications Infrastructure & Telecom Services Analyst in a recent video discusses how communications infrastructure such as towers enables edge computing today. He tours one of the country’s first access edge deployments in Statesboro, GA with Bernard Borghei, Executive Vice President-Operations & Co-Founder of Vertical Bridge and Doug Recker, President & Founder of EdgePresence.
Borghei explains that the tower site was originally built by one of the national mobile network operators in that location to provide wireless coverage for a major thoroughfare, and a nearby shopping center, residential area and state university. He pointed out the antenna arrays mounted on two platforms, each used by a different carrier, high up on the tower. Each platform supports antennas and remote radio units in a 3-sector configuration.
On the ground, he showed that one carrier is using an equipment shelter to house baseband equipment, power, and backhaul electronics. The other carrier uses an outdoor cabinet for the same purpose. Cables run from the ground facilities into an opening at the base of the tower then all the way up to the antenna arrays.
Vertical Bridge provides power and fiber to the site that each carrier accesses for their shelter or cabinet at a common connection point inside the tower compound.
Recker provided an inside look at EdgePresence’s mini data center installed at the base of the tower. He points out that the data center provides multiple backhaul paths for the wireless carriers since it colocates several fiber optic carriers.
The site is fully secure with mantraps and cameras. Despite its small size, the mini data center has the same elements as a much larger data center including server cabinets, power distribution units, uninterruptible power systems and N+1 redundancy configuration. This site houses eight cabinets requiring about 3 Kw of power and is used mainly for retail customers.
Larger sites can go up to 100 Kw to serve a bigger data processing load per cabinet in larger markets. Recker expects small data centers to become more attractive to cloud providers to take advantage of moving edge computing, and access to the internet, into markets they would normally serve from a distant data center.
View the full video, produced by Cowen and entitled, “Where is the Physical Edge?”
By John Celentano, Inside Towers Business Editor
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