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Comment by flyinglizard | Hacker News Reader

Large telecoms are already talking about edge computing at the base stations for 5G. It makes a lot of sense with modern distributed systems and would be great for gaming.

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Why? All these 5G stations will have fiber backhaul. You are probably saving <1ms of latency here, and there isn't really any limit on bandwidth. Cannot see why this makes any sense at all...

Why do you think it would be <1ms latency saving?

Just my ISPs PoP to Google's closest geo node is ~8ms and that is entirely over fiber and even going through IXPs.

I see it being huge for content caches and CDN's. I see it as more about saving backhaul bandwidth than anything else.

But if you have fiber 100 Gbps is easy and 10 Tbps is possible, at higher cost. This is today, in a year it will be 2 or 4x. This is all a single fiber pair, probably there are dozens.

Storage density growth has long outpaced bandwidth growth, so it makes more sense to have caches everywhere (and Internet protocols that can make use of them), then betting on growing bandwidth.

You might want to minimize the length of fiber you would need (and port costs on the DC side) by connecting from one base station node via another rather than backhauling everything directly to a datacenter somewhere; using edge caching can help reduce the congestion that this will cause.

Why would it be great for gaming?

A little Pokemon Go server instance running at each cell tower could be great for that, but for non-local internet games I'm not sure what the benefit world be.

Game live streaming at a reasonable latency.

How would caching improve realtime point to point connections?

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