Rugged, Micro Data Centers Bring Rural Reliability

Rural connectivity is still a huge issue. As of 2022, approximately 28 percent of Americans living in rural areas did not have access to broadband Internet, which at that time was defined by 25 megabits per second for download speeds, and 3 megabits per second for upload speeds by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). As of 2024, FCC came out with a new benchmark with higher speed requirements—increasing the number of people whose connections don’t meet the definition.One potential solution to the problem is small, rugged data centers with relatively old, redundant components, placed strategically in rural areas such that crucial data can be stored locally and network providers can route through them, providing redundancy.

“We are not the big AI users,” said Doug Recker, the CEO of Duos Edge AI, in a talk delivered at the Data Center World conference in Washington, D.C. earlier this month. “We’re still trying to resolve the problem from 20 years ago. These aren’t high-bandwidth or high-power data centers. We don’t need them out there. We just need better connectivity. We need robust networks.”

The Jacksonville, Florida-based startup provides small data centers (about the size of a shipping container) to rural areas, mostly in the Texas panhandle. They recently added such a data center in Amarillo, working with the local school district to provide more robust connectivity to students. The school district runs their learning platform on Amazon Web Services (AWS), and can now store that platform locally in the data center.

Previously, data had to travel to and from Dallas, over 500 kilometers away. Network outages were a common occurrence, impeding student learning. Recker’s company paid the upfront cost of US $1.2 to $1.5 million to build the 15-cabinet data center, which it calls a pod. Duos is making the money back by charging a monthly usage and maintenance fee (between $1800 and $3000 per shelf) to the school district and other customers.

The company follows a ‘build what’s needed and they will come’ approach. Once the data center is installed, Recker says, existing network providers co-locate there, providing redundancy and reliability to the customers. The pod provides a seed around which network providers can build a hub-and-spoke-type network.

3 Requirements for Edge Data Centers

The trick to making these edge data centers financially profitable is minimizing their energy usage and maximizing their reliability. To minimize energy use, Duos uses relatively old, time-tested equipment. For reliability, every piece of equipment is duplicated, including uninterruptible power supply batteries, generators, and air conditioning units.

They also have to locate the pods in places where there would still be a large enough number of potential customers to justify building a 15-rack pod (the equipment is rented out per rack).

The pods are unmanned, but efficient and timely maintenance is key. “Say your AC unit goes down at two in the morning,” Recker says. “It’s redundant, but you don’t want it to be down, so you have to dispatch somebody who can get into a pod at two o’clock in the morning.” Duos has a system for dispatching maintenance workers, and an auditing standard that remotely keeps track of all the work that has been done or needs to be done on each piece of equipment. Each pod also has a clean room to prevent maintenance workers from tracking in dust or dirt from outside while they work on repairs.

The compact data center allows the Amarillo school district to have affordable and reliable connectivity for their digital learning platform. Students will soon have access to AI-powered tools, simulations, and real-time data for their classes. “The pod enables that to happen because they can compute on site and host that environment on site where they couldn’t do it before because of the latency issues,” says Recker.

Duos is also placing pods elsewhere in the Texas panhandle, as well as Florida. And they’re getting so much demand in Amarillo that they’re planning to install a second pod. Recker says that although they initially built the pod in collaboration with the school district, other local institutions quickly became interested as well, including hospitals, utility companies, and farmers.