Cox Communications has merged its Edge computing unit into its private network business.
First reported by LightReading, the company folded its Cox Edge brand and capabilities into its Cox Private Networks business group about a year ago.
Cox Private Networks, launched by Cox Business in 2023, is part of Cox's Hospitality Network team and builds wireless networks for convention centers, hotels, and other large venues.
The Cox Edge brand launched in 2021, initially offering compute from around a dozen US markets. This was expanded to around 30 locations by late 2022, with the company planning 30 more in the future.
Cox Edge’s portfolio included content delivery network services, bare metal offerings, serverless compute, connectivity, virtual machines, distributed databases, and managed Kubernetes products.
Available locations included sites in San Diego and Santa Ana, California; Las Vegas, Nevada; Phoenix, Arizona; Merrifield, Virginia; Omaha, Nebraska; Tulsa, Oklahoma; Johnson, Arkansas; and Pensacola, Florida
Cox representative Todd Smith told LightReading the company still owns the roughly 30 different computing sites across the US that previously comprised Cox Edge. Those sites are now part of the capabilities provided within Cox's private networks business.
The Cox Edge website no longer works, and the private networks website makes little reference to Edge compute.
Lightreading notes Cox’s Edge business was previously led by Ron Lev as GM, but he left in 2023 and is now head of Edge at NTT Data.
While STL Partners predicts there will be as many as 1,800 “network Edge” data centers globally by 2028 – up from just over 800 today – the firm noted in a recent report that it had noticed companies “winding down their network Edge propositions, having already built capacity,” for the first time.
“This is the case for AT&T (which had deployed two sites) and Cox Communications (which had deployed 30 sites),” STL said in a report published in December.
“When it comes to Edge AI, the network Edge is like the ‘ugly duckling,’ with other forms of Edge computing deployment at current providing more attractive solutions for enterprises,” said George Glanville, research analyst at STL. “For example, on-premise Edge is playing a critical role in providing a secure and sovereign environment for enterprises to perform AI inference. Meanwhile, regional Edge data centers are benefiting from the surge in demand for environments that can support AI model training.”
Cox Business still offers colocation services from 21 locations in 12 cities across Nevada, California, Arizona, Georgia, Virginia, Kansas, Nebraska, and Oklahoma.
