It has been decades since tier-one telcos actually had a significant role in customer premises equipment business. Back in the monopoly era, telcos actually made and sold the phone devices people used. In fact, it was illegal to use any phone not manufactured by the service provider.
In the competitive era, service providers have been irrelevant as suppliers of CPE, as that role was ceded to device suppliers active in the consumer electronics space.
In recent years we have seen new efforts by some device suppliers to dramatically reduce smartphone prices, driven by the need for such devices in developing markets. But technology and business opportunity never stands still in the communications business.
Could edge computing create new opportunities for access providers as suppliers or partners with mobile device manufacturers? AT&T believes that could happen.
AT&T, for example, plans to build thousands of small edge computing data centers in central offices and other locations across the United States. So could a big edge computing network affect mobile phone design as much as cloud computing has affected the design and use of computing devices? AT&T’s Mazin Gilbert, VP, thinks that is a possibility.
Edge computing could create the conditions for really cheap smartphones. “Can my $1,000 mobile phone be $10 or $20 dollars, where all the intelligence is really sitting at the edge?,” Gilbert asks. “It’s absolutely possible.”
That obviously would dramatically reduce barriers to smartphone use by everyone, while providing some means of differentiation for access services provided by AT&T. Both trends would provide more reasons for consumers or businesses to use the AT&T network, instead of rival networks.
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