The hottest topic in data centers for many is the edge. Low latency, high bandwidth 5G traffic. Companies have pitched their solutions to be new structures that can house equipment at the edge in metro areas.

Stacey Higginbotham has a post summarizing the current state of where AWS and Azure are at partnering with Telcos for 5G edge solutions.

The AWS deal looks like this.

With the Verizon-Amazon deal, Amazon is putting its hardware inside metro data centers operated by carriers. The goal is to allow developers building latency-sensitive use cases access to networks closer to their end users. It’s part of a new service AWS calls Wavelength. These data centers will act like an Amazon availability zone, although Amazon’s Raj Pai, vice president of EC2 for AWS, explained that Amazon is calling these “Wavelength Zones.” Developers will simply choose Wavelength Zones in cities where they want to deploy their latency-sensitive services, and Amazon will ensure the Wavelength Zones closest to the user field the traffic.

The Azure deal looks like this.

AT&T’s deal with Microsoft Azure is similar, but AT&T is letting Microsoft put gear inside its radio access network. So far, the Microsoft Azure services will only be available in Dallas. Next year, AT&T plans to add Los Angeles and Atlanta.

And as Stacey mentions there is no reason why the Telcos would not have multiple deals for each cloud.

The idea behind both networks is the same, and I expect we’ll see AT&T sign deals with Amazon, and Verizon sign deals with Microsoft Azure.

The other question is what will Google do?

With Amazon, Microsoft, and Google all having 5G edge solutions with strategic partnerships with Telcos what is the Edge DC opportunity? Can’t each of these companies share its own micro data center solution that is an edge container.

Google was first with a container data center. Then Microsoft and eventually AWS. They have all learned the advantages and disadvantages of deploying and running containers. If they think mini container at the edge is a solution they have the no how and they have the Cloud hardware and software.

Seems really hard to be in the edge DC business as the Telcos dedicate resources to work on the integration of AWS and Cloud infratructure.