Reinventing e-waste: a case for repurposing old smartphones for remote computing applications

Abstract

Most of us have one or more old smartphones or know someone with an old extra smartphone. These devices typically have valuable assets such as CPU, RAM, and unused storage capacity, often left untapped. Additionally, upgrading to new smartphones every two years results in hundreds of millions of devices being replaced annually, with broken screens being a common reason for replacement. While these phones may be considered unusable for the average consumer, they still hold the potential to serve remote computing needs. Mobile devices are competent these days, with Mobile CPU single-core thermal design saturated around 1.5W. Their performance-power budget is extremely low compared to typical data center offerings. Any I/O-intensive application where the CPU is not saturated can be offered to business customers at a much lower price. After we extract all the computing power these smartphones offer, they can be recycled as they were going to be anyway. Additional value can be found for these mobile devices without going unused. In the next two to three years, mobile devices must upgrade to 5G to remain current with technology. Consumers will eventually change their phones. These old phones can generate computing power cheaper and can be served to organizations/individuals to reduce their cloud computing expenses. This computing power can be sold as a service that could be a valuable alternative to traditional cloud computing services. The study's objective is to find our startup’s go-to-market strategy. To identify and analyse the target market, competition, customer pain points, and a high-level strategy to launch the service and success metric.