Author: Nancy Shemwell @nancyshemwell

3 min read

In recent weeks you may have seen increased discussion regarding the need for edge compute capabilities across rural America.  The majority of this conversation stems from Trilogy Network’s creation of The Rural Cloud Initiative. Formed to bring together an ecosystem of technology providers, wired and wireless service providers and application developers to extend the power of IoT and Artificial Intelligence to underserved rural markets. 

The value of a coalition such as the RCI has never been greater, as the federal government begins to pour billions of dollars into rural infrastructure to protect our food supply, address the global food shortage, achieve energy independence and to ensure our nation’s security.  Where this financial assistance is vital to facilitate digital transformation, it is likewise imperative that these complicated solutions are deployed quickly and effectively.  Bringing the best in breed innovation partners to work together in partnership with the rural carrier accelerates the availability of such transformative solutions in rural America.

Trilogy Networks and their RCI innovation partners are creating the technology and software solutions required to distribute the centralized cloud on a global scale. The network partners are granting unprecedented access to their infrastructure and Trilogy is committed to deploying edge solutions that will ultimately cover 1.5 million square miles across rural America.

In its first phase, RCI will utilize edge computing and 5G public and private wireless networks to support precision agriculture with real-time data collected and acted upon from connected IoT devices. The ultimate goal is to double the crop output over the next few decades with no increase in land, water or cost. Ensuring the integrity and dramatically increasing the productivity of the United States food supply chain is a major objective of RCI and has become even more critical in the current pandemic environment.

“For precision agriculture to achieve the maximum potential, it’s imperative the edge be brought directly to the farm operation,” said George Woodward, CEO at Trilogy Networks and board member on the US Precision Agriculture Connectivity Task Force. “Partnering with telecom operators and innovation partners will enable the RCI to deliver the real-time business intelligence needed by America’s two million farmers.” By removing the complexity, cost, latency and risk associated with distributed cloud networking, we can deliver solutions that possess the specific requirements for highly distributed applications, such as precision agriculture, to succeed.”

How and when will they begin rolling this out?  “Watch this space” says Woodward, “we will unveil our plan later this month”.