Telecommunications companies have the perfect edge cloud infrastructure for AI up their sleeve

Telecommunications companies are sitting on thousands of old central office (CO) facilities sprinkled across the U.S. that could be just right for serving latency-sensitive artificial intelligence (AI) applications. And it seems they’re waking up to this fact as they continue efforts to retire the old copper network gear previously housed in these structures. AT&T, Lumen Technologies, Frontier Communications and Ziply Fiber are among the operators which have started using their old COs for colocation and other cloud deployments. Lumen, meanwhile, is using COs for enterprise colocation. How did operators end up in this position in the first place? Demand for legacy copper and DSL services—which relied on active electronics housed in these central offices—has plummeted with the rise of higher speed fiber and fixed wireless access broadband offerings.