Europe’s largest independent towerco, Cellnex, has been expanding its business model into active networks (via its Polish acquisitions), small cells and private enterprise services. Its latest plan is to become an “edgeco”, following US counterparts such as Crown Castle into developing neutral host services for cloud infrastructure. These small, localized data centers could be offered to enterprises or even hyperscalers to support services that require a very distributed cloud, but the first port of call is likely to be operators. That would enable Cellnex to offer a widened range of infrastructure to its established customer base, and tap into nascent deployments of virtualized RANs, which will require edge cloud to support distributed units close to the cell site. …