The Muddy Edge of Computing
Starlink and Project Kuiper have shot life back into the concept of a satellite phone. Satellite phones were once the go-to gadget of drug dealers or oil expeditions but will soon be something that is part of every Apple or Samsung device, or maybe even a resurrected Amazon Fire Phone.
We’ll lose the excuse of driving into an area of bad cellphone coverage when we want to get off of a conversation. However, with every device being accessible almost anywhere, this means that there will be more value in developing applications that use edge computing as it will save quite a bit of energy than having to beam information from one region to another.
But the real question is where will that edge be?
What we may see are small clusters of devices closest to the user being using to process applications. These will seamlessly move along with the user. For satellite-based Internet, it may mean sessions being passed one satellite to another overheard like a game of hot potato. For 5G, it may mean the notes themselves do some processing, or even the devices closest to the user.
A server first used to mean some box that you loaded software on. Then distributed computing made “virtual instances” that could be run in different regions. With the next technologies, will have clusters that follow around the users.
The edge will move with them.
