A nascent but potentially highly significant trend is for operators and telecom infrastructure suppliers to invest directly in edge cloud assets. While most telcos have pulled back from building their own centralized telco clouds, and will rely on partnerships with cloud providers, some are interested in investing in more distributed edge clouds. Towercos, too, are eyeing edge data centers as a potential addition to their neutral host infrastructure model, and the three leading US tower providers are all actively developing this business. And even where telcos do not want to build an edge cloud, they do not have to buy edge capacity on the open marketplace. Their central offices, switching centers and cell sites make up a dense real estate…