CenturyLink’s edge strategy involves investing “several hundred-million” dollars in edge computing services and turning on about 100 initial locations across the U.S. that will provide hybrid cloud and managed services, the company today announced.

The new investment in edge targets enterprises, hyperscalers, wireless carriers, and system integrators. It takes advantage of CenturyLink’s massive dark fiber network — the company has 4.7 million miles in North America alone — that connects to more than 2,200 points of presence (PoPs) in public and private data centers and over 150,000 enterprise buildings. And it can connect all of these existing buildings to edge locations within 5 milliseconds of transport time, said Dave Shacochis, VP of product management for hybrid IT solutions at CenturyLink.

Shacochis won’t provide a specific dollar amount. “It’s a significant investment, and it’s going to continue over time,” he said. “We don’t view our investments in the network as a one-time activity.”

CenturyLink already provides low-latency and high-bandwidth network connections and is in talks with several customers about edge use cases and trials, he said. “We’re in the market today with solutions that help drive edge computing, and we’re helping companies move workloads closer to interactions between business models, people, and things, and all the different combinations therein.”

But while CenturyLink’s edge services today tend to be more “on a bespoke basis,” by 2020 “we expect a huge influx of ready-to-go capacity, a huge burst of these to come online,” Shacochis said.

On the company’s earnings call last week CEO Jeff Storey teased an edge roll out and said CenturyLink was in trials with a customer that has about 2,000 nationwide locations. Because CenturyLink’s existing infrastructure is positioned within 5 milliseconds of transport time for 95% of this unnamed customer’s sites, “the customer’s applications and data can be processed more efficiently from 100 or so of our edge locations, rather than processed on premise at 2,000 separate sites,” Storey said, according to a transcript.

In an interview with SDxCentral, Shacochis provided additional details about this edge deal. The customer is a transportation and logistics company, and it worked with CenturyLink to design business logic and design control systems for its 2,000 sites. “They were really inspired by and satisfied with their ability to design the software to react to sensor conditions and implement control changes in their facilities, but they were finding they could not do it fast enough,” he said. The company considered building mini data centers in each of its 2,000 facilities, but CenturyLink’s ability to serve all of its local locations within 5 milliseconds of latency proved a more cost-effective endeavor.

“That’s what led us to run through that exercise with a customer and say you could, at zero seconds of transit latency implement a computing facility inside your buildings,” Shacochis said. “But we can serve all of them within a 5-millisecond halo.”

As it pursues its edge strategy, CenturyLink faces stiff competition from network operators like AT&T and Verizon, which are rolling out their own edge computing services. However, CenturyLink has the advantage of “still being a business services company,” Shacochis said. “One of our big differences is the fact that we are not just a network services provider. We have the broad IT services capability where we can take a look at what the customer is trying to achieve and develop a solution that will enable that outcome. We haven’t pulled away from the IT solutions market and focused only on wireless.”

Instead, it has focused on customers’ business initiatives that require low-latency, high bandwidth connections, and deployment in different geographies to meet data sovereignty regulations, he said. “We’re selling a range of technologies that can deliver the desired solutions using edge computing principles.”

Plus, CenturyLink’s edge strategy involves its managed services, consulting, and security businesses “that can keep an eye on everything end to end,” Shacochis said.

As it moves ahead with its edge services, the company plans to expand its edge computing footprint beyond the initial 100 U.S. sites and “take advantage of CenturyLink’s global reach as part of its scope,” Shacochis said.

It also plans to announce new customers, product capabilities, and partners at the edge, he said. For example, “partners helping us with IoT device types of alliances, analytics types of alliances. We’re taking a lot of our investments and driving them toward this edge footprint so we can go up the stack with our value proposition.”

Edge computing requires both the physical PoPs and the network connectivity “and CenturyLink has both of those in abundance,” Shacochis said, adding that it can layer compute on top to deliver services like hybrid cloud and virtualization at the edge.

CenturyLink is a VMware Cloud Verified Partner, meaning its services are compatible with VMware cloud infrastructure. It’s also an Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure managed service provider partner. “A lot of these companies are starting to think about edge, and there’s a lot of exciting potential opportunities with partners as we move up the stack.”