Random Thoughts
by Phill Lawson-Shanks, Chief Innovation Officer, EdgeConneX®
Access to the Internet and all its myriad services is taken for granted by so many of us in North America and Europe, but for many countries with highly developed economies, this is not the case.
The Internet, with its vast pipes and connected data centers delivering on-demand videos, email, access to your financial services, hosted workspace, etc., are not readily available in South America. There can be access, certainly, but the data and services are delivered via subsea cable on-ramps in Miami and Los Angeles. It’s the same story we saw play out over the past five years in high GDP metro regions that were Internet-poor because they had to pull all their services from a handful of large peering cities.
The EdgeConneX® Edge Data Center® (EDC) model changes all that by bringing the content and peering local to the people and businesses that need to use them. We did the same for the hyperscalers who realized that multi-megawatt data farms built to maximize low cost power and positioned where most people don't live was a great strategy for data lakes and processing farms, but not suitable for low latency access by their customers.
By building regional cloud Edge Data Centers in close proximity to their customers along with the fast on-ramps in metro EDCs, the hyperscalers now have the best of all models to service their ever-growing customer base.
This is what EdgeConneX intends to do for South America. By bringing the latest technology in data center construction, operations and management, EdgeConneX will bring new core Internet locations to the regions that need them. And, along with the network core, we will help foster and grow new ecosystems specifically suited to a region’s unique needs and requirements. There is no reason why Rio or Santiago can't be the next Ashburn, Santa Clara, or Amsterdam.
The Internet is now more than ever a critical infrastructure and as such needs to be available to everyone. EdgeConneX is committed to building the new Edge of the Internet in record speed exactly where our clients need it to be. No more second-class Internet countries.
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For more thoughts about EdgeConneX® from Pihll Lawson-Shanks, visit our website at www.edgeconnex.com.
