Telco Edge Cloud and the Evolution of Cell Tower Sites

American Tower has officially launched its American Tower Edge Data Center initiative this year, deploying six edge data centers in Denver and Boulder, Colorado; Pittsburgh; Atlanta; Jacksonville, Florida; and Austin, Texas. This initiative is propelled by American Tower’s substantially established infrastructure, already equipped with adequate connectivity and power, throughout the world. As of October 9, the company has an estimated 181,000 cell tower sites worldwide, 40,000 of which are located in the United States.

The initiative will be executed in two phases. The first phase will center on leveraging its real estate, electricity, security, and dark fiber assets to augment enterprises’ distributed data center strategies. The company will initially cater to IT companies and managed service providers that want to place their applications nearer to their enterprise customers without having to send data back and forth from distant data centers.

The second phase, which involves the migration of network carrier’s services to the edge in their 5G deployments, is a more extensive and impactful overhaul of the status quo. 5G and its increased standards of latency, reliability, and increased device density requires a proliferation of edge data centers—specifically, a distributed architecture based on Control Plane and User Plane Separation (CUPS). Aside from having carrier-grade reliability and security standards, American Tower’s highly dispersed tower sites can provide Communication Service Providers (CSPs) a good head start in establishing proliferated aggregation sites for their edge cloud strategies. A CSP’s extensive presence throughout a region positions it to effectively meet the latency requirements of diverse use cases of industry verticals.

An important consideration for American Tower is to first identify which tower sites are ideal for telco edge cloud data center deployments. The company is working closely with its Geographic Information System (GIS) team to accurately pinpoint which sites are suitable. The complexity in navigating the high variance of cell tower site locations is compounded by additional considerations such as maintaining stringent Quality of Service (QoS)/Service Level Agreements (SLAs) of different use cases and overcoming practical limitations (i.e., optimizing power and space).

Furthermore, the increased security and reduced latency benefits (as low as 10 ms from basestation to application) of telco edge cloud data centers are derived from the proliferation of edge storage and computation nodes situated in either central offices or, in this case, cell tower sites. Managing this influx of edge sites (ranging from hundreds to thousands) will be an additional issue for CSPs to address. Telco edge cloud implementations will need to be efficient and resourceful to address these challenges.

From a hardware perspective, CSPs would need to optimize cell site real estate with streamlined network equipment that not only have a reduced physical footprint but are also capable of delivering high standards of network services. Network equipment must have a denser and more compact form factor with dual power supplies; this is critical for saving space while ensuring network reliability through stable power supply. Hardware must also have increased durability and temperature range support to establish high-capacity connectivity in uncontrolled environments.

Scaling bandwidth demand growth through proportionate deployments of equipment is not a feasible strategy for spatially challenged edge data centers. 400ZR pluggable coherent optics, for example, can augment edge data centers and 4G/5G any-haul scenarios by providing high-capacity, power-optimized aggregation and transport with minimal impact to network switching density. 400ZR optics are mainly designed for use in shorter reach, metro/regional networks, and Internet Protocol over Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) applications in which coherent optics are plugged directly into switches and routers.

Furthermore, the introduction of varying enterprise connectivity demands of 5G and management of proliferated edge sites also require CSPs to have open data center fabric solutions that utilize AI-enabled Network Operating Systems (NOS), Software Defined Network (SDN) controllers, and tools to efficiently (and automatically) customize networks and workloads. Rapid reconfigurability and automation need to be brought in to provide real-time execution of bandwidth allocation, network visibility, and multi-layer orchestration. Network visibility is also important because the legacy Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) model will not scale to accurately predict/detect, isolate, and resolve application performance issues in near real time.

Tower companies must recognize how edge cloud data centers can revitalize the conventional tower leasing business models. Tower companies can diversify revenue streams by utilizing their distributed real estate for edge cloud data center deployments, and recent industry activity has reflected the efforts of various tower companies in fortifying their edge data center capabilities. Selecting the best business model for edge cloud, however, is still uncertain given how the technologies and deployments are only at nascent stages. The expedient step for tower companies to take is to initially lease space to companies with data center expertise. The need for more real estate for these data center companies/cloud providers to host their distributed aggregation sites can be met by tower companies’ legacy infrastructure.

However, a possibly more lucrative strategy would be for tower companies to proactively evolve their capabilities in providing data center services by themselves. The rising edge cloud opportunity and the importance of expertise to capitalize on this opportunity is not lost on the major players in the tower industry, and this can be seen from recent tower company acquisitions and partnerships. Tower companies are strategically acquiring data centers or partnering with data center companies to bolster their data center operational capabilities. These steps are aimed to enhance their edge cloud value proposition to meet the demands of the growing number of high-bandwidth, low-latency use cases of enterprise/CSP customers.

For example:

• SBA has recently purchased one data center for US$61.6 million. The data center, called JaxNAP, sports 280,000 square feet of computing space along with interconnections to 20 fiber providers, including subsea telecommunications routes for international communications. In 2019, American Tower acquired Atlanta-based Colo Atl data center to learn more about how data centers operate and how enterprises cross-connect in the data center.
• Crown Castle has also provided funding and support to Vapor IO’s plan to roll out its Kinetic Edge platform in 36 markets by 2021. This joint venture has benefited both Vapor IO and Crown Castle. Vapor IO can leverage Crown Castle’s infrastructure assets to expedite deployments and, by doing so, will simultaneously add value to Crown Castle’s towers through the added data center features.