At the edge as in the central cloud, large operators are increasingly breaking bread with the webscale giants rather than trying to compete with them. A few months after Amazon AWS signed up Verizon, Vodafone and SK Telecom for its Wavelengths edge computing platform, Microsoft has previewed its own offering, Azure Edge Zones, and gained support from 10 large operators. Azure Edge Zones implements the Azure Stack Edge – computing, storage and platform services – on a telco or enterprise premises together with a private 4G or 5G network. This bid by Microsoft to extend its enterprise position into cellular connectivity and services ties in with its recent acquisition of virtualized core network provider Affirmed Networks. The list of initial…