The research, from the Linux Foundation, says that growth is going to be driven by the deployment of 5G in industry, alongside the commoditisation of edge hardware and the rise of open source networking software. It expects investment to be equally split between equipment for the device edge and infrastructure edge.
Legacy data centres are set to become obsolete in the next few years. That's a trend that has been accelerated by the pandemic which has driven the development of tools for remote monitoring, provisioning, repair and management and reduced the cost of edge computing while driving up its use by automation technologies and autonomous systems across sectors from manufacturing to remote healthcare, data management, surveillance and public services.
The report says that micro data centres at wireless towers and cable head-ends will power edge computing and become the ‘centres of gravity’ for local interconnection and edge exchange, creating new and more efficient data paths.
So as digital services proliferate and drive demand for edge computing, so the diversity of network performance requirements is expected to increase.
