Google Cloud has traditionally been a distant third behind Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure when it comes to telco cloud services but it is closing on the two giants rapidly by offering a strong combination of differentiators – a highly edge-centric approach, a willingness to support very telco-specific ways of working, and a heavy focus on AI-enabled analytics. The last of these has been particularly prominent in two recent deals that Google Cloud has signed with Vodafone, and now with Telenor, to add to its first major telecoms client, TIM. Telenor has announced its widest and deepest public cloud deal to date, as it follows other telcos such as AT&T into a far greater reliance on hyperscalers to support network control and network…