AT&T has been one of the most decisive of the established operators about moving many of its operations to the public cloud. In 2019 it announced a ‘public cloud-first’ strategy for its data center and IT platforms, and signed cloud partnerships with Microsoft Azure, as well as with IBM. It seemed only a matter of time before the network, as well as the IT systems, moved to the public cloud, but the decision to do this has come at an earlier stage than most expected. This has followed earlier decisions to pull out of the cloud services market itself, and to sell many of its own telco cloud data centers and rely on third parties. That set the stage for…