Our reliance on technology grows more and more every day. Most of us would be lost without our mobile devices. From accessing email, to surfing the web, to streaming online videos and music, we have the luxury of these services readily available and at the touch of a button. It was once good enough to have access to all of these services. In recent years, however, there is more to be desired: faster access and enhanced video quality. Companies such as Netflix, which reported a total of 93.8 million subscribers this year, and other web content companies, are working to enhance the quality of their services so viewers can not only binge watch TV shows and movies, but binge watch in high definition.
Sounds good, right? Well, there is more to it. There’s little concern for people located in the top metros, such as New York and Los Angeles, about speed and high-definition quality of the online videos they are accessing with these high-bandwidth web services. That might not be the case for those classified in Tier II data center markets, such as Orlando, FL, for example. Traditionally, if a user in a Tier II market wanted to access internet-based content, that content would come from the next closest market. As technology has grown, and the need for faster, higher-quality service has arrived, a new type of facility that reaches those in Tier II markets has emerged and is known as “edge data centers.” Quite simply, these are facilities that “extend” the internet further to markets in need.