Vapor IO, developers of the Kinetic Grid platform, an Open Grid network for delivering edge and grid services, has teamed up with Cellnex Telecom, an independent wireless telecommunications operator in Europe, to expand its network edge to Europe. The deployment will be in Barcelona and will add to the 36 cities already served by Vapor IO in the United States. This edge grid is expected to expand over the next couple of years throughout Europe thanks to the vast infrastructure for digital services that Cellnex currently operates.
This collaborative project aims to improve the delivery of new, monetisable services by reducing data traffic towards the core of the wireless and fibre networks, enhancing data sovereignty and enabling the development of stable, low latency services such as real-time computer vision for public safety, smart retail, industrial robotics, autonomous vehicles, medical imaging and online gaming. Moreover, the project will enable the efficient deployment of virtualised radio access network technology (Open RAN or vRAN).
Cellnex is making available a portfolio of small edge data centres and tower ground space for hosting the necessary equipment for edge computing. In addition, several fibre routes, provided by Cellnex and/or Cellnex´s mobile network operator customers, will interconnect these edge data centres creating a “grid” of edge nodes.
Vapor IO’s global Kinetic Grid platform delivers next generation internet and communications capabilities to metropolitan regions by bringing networking and automation software that enables micro modular data centres, software defined networks and hyperscale backbones to operate autonomously in highly-distributed edge locations, such as cell tower sites and edge data centres. Serving a wireless carriers, cloud providers, web-scale companies and other innovative enterprises, Vapor IO’s Kinetic Grid combines neutral, multi-tenant colocation with software-defined interconnection and high-speed networking to deliver flexible, highly-distributed Internet and communications infrastructure at the edge of the wired and wireless networks.
Eduardo Fichmann, global director of innovation and product strategy at Cellnex, says, “Cellnex is delighted to enable Vapor IO’s neutral host Kinetic Grid to Europe, starting in Barcelona. We invite our anchor tenants and global telecom service providers to leverage this partnership to virtualise the computing infrastructure in such a way that it will allow the federation and optimisation of the use of computing resources and of the network itself by third-party applications on a neutral host model”.
“This agreement with Vapor IO”, adds Eduardo Fichmann, “strengthens Cellnex’s strategy of leveraging infrastructure in locations co-located with operator equipment at the towers or edge data centres, that will give rise to organic revenue growth for the Company. It is expected that in the coming years there will be an explosion in applications and services that require computing in places physically closer to the end user, which implies an increase in the demand for this type of infrastructure. Vapor IO´s track record of building dozens of markets at scale using a just-in-time delivery model, and Cellnex’s industrial model of deploying and managing distributed telecommunications infrastructure at scale in Europe, will allow the roll out of edge nodes in European locations over coming years
Cole Crawford, Vapor IO´s founder and CEO, notes “Vapor IO and Cellnex share a common commitment to neutral host infrastructure. Vapor IO’s Kinetic Grid is both cloud-neutral and carrier-neutral, meaning it is one of the few locations at the edge where both carriers and clouds can meet on equal terms. We invite cloud and technology providers to leverage our edge and grid computing infrastructure to deploy new classes of high-performance applications that cannot be serviced by today’s cloud infrastructure.
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