[reza_n]

Edge facilities are warehouses in regional locations with excellent backbone connectivity, basically your modern datacenter. Cellphone towers can probably host a few racks, that's not a profitable business and its not "internet scale". If the regional datacenter has a 15ms ping to each tower in the region, then you have pretty good coverage.

[useful]

I think you underestimate what the edge will become. There are already startups trying to store your data at your house, cellphone tower, isp, etc. In ways where there is no central store or in ways that everything is eventually consistent. Computing at the edge is a very interesting topic.

[toast0]

Storing my data at my house makes sense, especially if upkeep of the box is relegated to the end user. Storing my data at the tower in my neighborhood, instead of a regional center seems to be a large increase in maintenance cost for a minimal decrease in latency.

Accessing the tower is expensive in time, and equipment that runs at the tower is exposed to a wider variety of temperatures and RF stress than in a nice warehouse somewhere in the metro area.

It's possible the right caching at towers could reduce the backhaul bandwidth requirements, but seems iffy.

[nyc_pizzadev]

For an edge to work, you need security. That means transport encryption which requires certs. I think this fact alone will keep the edge at modern secured datacenters. There is limited physical security at cell sites. Even less at the users home. This could mean there is no more transport encryption for this kind of edge. Or even worse, private key loss.

Not saying no here, just pointing out a very large concern.

[zackbloom]

Have you taken a look at the Cloudflare Keyless SSL tech?

[nyc_pizzadev]

Just did and I think it furthers my point. Cloudflare now owns your key and the edge is now their network.

My concern is cert/key management where the edge is somewhere you have very little control over, like a cell tower, random building network, or a users house. Even with keyless, once that device is in my home, Im pretty sure that entire thing can be reverse engineered. Not easy, like probes and oscilloscopes on exposed leads hard, but physical access is pretty much game over, no?

I've worked in this space and the solution is detection and mitigation. Limit the damage to single devices, workflow the user in, look for human attack patterns. Defense is futile.

[iancarroll]

The point is that the key is never in the possession of the edge (i.e. Cloudflare). There is no way the edge could recover the key. They can use it to sign whatever they want, while you allow them to, although you can take whatever auditing measures you'd like there.

[freyr]

Why is storage at a (space-limited) cell tower more interesting than storage/compute at the ISP or packet core (or whatever's at the other end of the backhaul)?

How much latency do you think is incurred between the ISP and cell tower?