In Issue #2 of SDxCentral Magazine, we travel to Taiwan to find out about the network behind the country's ubiquitous convenience store, 7-Eleven. With over 7,300 locations and the highest density of 7-Elevens anywhere in the world, "Little 7" handles everything from bill payments to parcel delivery, all running on a single Chunghwa Telecom-serviced network resilient enough to keep functioning when submarine cables get severed.
We also head to X-Store 9, 7-Eleven's experimental store-of-the-future lab on a university campus in Taoyuan, where 140 ceiling-mounted cameras and LiDAR-based skeletal tracking follow shoppers' every move (including our own reporter's). Unlike Amazon's failed cashierless stores, this one runs entirely on edge AI – no cloud, no remote human contractors, just a micro data center in the back room doing inferencing in real time.
We also sat down with some of the industry's leading networking minds this issue, including OpenAI's Mark Handley on AI-scale transport protocols, AMD's Soni Jiandani on programmability, and Verizon CTO Yago Tenorio on virtualizing the network core.
Also inside:
- Inside access to a quantum data center and Ericsson's 5G smart factory
- A deep dive into whether AI can help telecom players monetize their networks
- Conversations with fiber giants on how cables actually come together
- Defining what it truly means to be a 'neocloud'