CenturyLink Plans ‘Several Hundred-Million-Dollar’ Edge Compute Investment

CenturyLink on Monday unveiled its new edge-focused strategy, which includes creating more than 100 initial edge compute locations across the United States, and providing a range of hybrid cloud solutions and managed services.

Enterprise customers, hyperscale clouds, wireless carriers and system integrators will benefit from the strategy, CenturyLink said.

The strategy will start with a “several hundred-million-dollar” investment to build out and support edge compute services. It’s designed to allow customers to advance their next-gen digital transformation with technology that integrates high-performance, low-latency networking with cloud service provider platforms in customized configurations.

CenturyLink’s Garrett Gee

Garrett Gee, CenturyLink‘s senior vice president of indirect and alliances, tells us this commitment to growing edge services will give partners the ability to provide their customers with “more efficient, scalable compute power to not only improve the performance of existing applications, but also enable emerging applications that control and enhance the interactions between businesses, people and things.”

“As demand for distributed computing solutions continues to grow, this investment ensures our partners can continue to utilize CenturyLink to deliver the compute, storage and networking capability necessary to meet their customers evolving technology needs,” he said.

This expansion allows businesses and government agencies to leverage a global fiber network with edge facilities designed to serve their local locations within five milliseconds of latency, the company said. With this infrastructure, companies will be able to complete the linkage from office location to market edge compute aggregation, to public cloud and data centers with “redundant and dynamically consumable” network, it said.

“Customers are increasingly coming to us for help with applications where latency, bandwidth and geography are critical considerations,” said Paul Savill, CenturyLink’s senior vice president of product management. “This investment creates the platform for CenturyLink to enable enterprises, hyperscalers, wireless carriers and system integrators with the technology elements to drive years of innovation where workloads get placed closer to customers’ digital interactions.”