The telecommunications industry is moving to cloud-based technologies at the network edge to help tackle the explosion of mobile video consumption, service mobility, virtualization of Customer-Premise Equipment (CPE), the Internet of Things (IoT), and other latency-sensitive applications. But unfortunately today, much of the compute still happens at the center of the network or on the client device. This situation results in more traffic, higher latency, and less flexibility.
Moving processing closer together—away from the two furthest points where it happens today, the network core and the client, toward the network edge and aggregation layers—can speed deployment and reduce TCO for carriers. In these environments, flexible general-purpose compute will drive the most value. 
If “data is the new currency”, then positioning compute should be like choosing an oil well site: as close to the resource as possible, yet comprehending the geographic transport issues.
Table of Contents
- Executive Summary
- The Changing Carrier Landscape
- Optimizing for More Flexible and Cost-effective Compute
- Focusing Investment
- Building Agnostic, Standardized Infrastructures
- Silicon Platform Requirements
- Optimizing the Network
- Figure 1: Moving Compute Brings Significant Benefits to Carriers
You can download the paper here.
Companies Cited
- Altera
- AMD
- Applied Micro
- ARM
- Avago
- Broadcom
- Cavium
- Cisco
- Comcast
- Freescale
- Hi-Silicon
- IBM
- IDC
- Marvell
- Netronome
- Oracle
- PMC Sierra
- Telefonica
- TI
- Qualcomm
- Xilinx