The biggest question facing operators as they devise their strategies for edge computing is whether the cloud giants will be competitors or partners. In the centralized cloud, the scale of Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure is hard to beat, but as the cloud is distributed to ever-more dispersed locations, the distributed nature of a telco’s network and sites mean it has more to bring to the table. An operator might partner with AWS or Azure, providing locations and high-quality connectivity, while the cloud company brings its services and brand. As services become more personalized and differentiated, the operator might increase its place in the value chain by supporting network slicing from data center to edge. Those slices might call up…