Mobile UK Tower Provider Cornerstone to Deploy Micro-Edge Compute Capabilities
Mobile infrastructure company Cornerstone (CTIL), which was originally established as part of a UK network sharing agreement between O2 (Virgin Media) and Vodafone (Vantage Towers), has today announced a new strategic partnership with StonesThro to deploy a nationally distributed Micro-Edge cloud infrastructure via their estate of c.16,000 mast / cell sites.
The idea of installing what are effectively mini data centres on such infrastructure, across Cornerstone’s national estate, is an interesting one. The approach could be used to address the ever-present need for increased data processing speed and capacity, data sovereignty, and national infrastructure resilience etc. Obviously, this would make all those mast sites even more commercially attractive in the process.
Given the current international climate, it probably doesn’t hurt to be deploying a UK-centric solution to the growing dependency on centralised, often foreign-owned, cloud architectures – reducing exposure to international jurisdiction problems and external interference.
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“The core of the Cornerstone and StonesThro partnership is the shared ambition that for critical systems to be truly resilient, computing power must reside within national borders and closer to the point of use,” said the announcement.
Pat Coxen, CEO at Cornerstone, said:
“The breadth and reach of our infrastructure estate has the ability to enable UK digital connectivity on an unrivalled scale. By partnering with StonesThro, we are evolving our estate infrastructure from being predominantly about communication to focussing on locally processing data, and the intelligent application of information.
We are providing the ‘where’ for the micro-edge, enabling a network that is not only resilient, but also physically situated within the communities and industries it serves.”
At present, it’s unclear precisely how many such sites will be deployed with the new solution or who will be looking to harness it, but in theory this might also help to improve the economic models for deploying new mast sites in some otherwise challenging areas. Time will tell.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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I find the idea of deploying compute to the mobile mast a bit strange. Mobile connections usually have tens of milliseconds of latency — so why would a provider want to install compute at the mast to cut a few milliseconds of latency between the mast and a “proper” datacentre? Feels like a somewhat pointless exercise.
There are 5G modes where the radio latency is meant to be sub 1ms, though I don’t know if anyone really has found a use for that. This edge compute is meant to pair with those
This means they’d improve the battery backups, right? Right? …Right?
Im glad we have created some debate thanks for your thoughts. Low latency was not the only reason we went for this partnership with Cornerstone , as the article suggests we have a highly distributed sovereign architecture which gives high availability and control. We also connect via fibre so it a carrier neutral aspiration. Although the speed of light is a big number, moving compute closer to the users reduces congestion and jitter. We are also finding ESG benefits in a distributed national architecture.
With that MBA-guff rich and apostrophe-poor statement (unattributed), you have revealed the paucity of technical foundation. Not so much creating the vapours of debate, more seeing-what-sticks.
You aren’t demonstrating how the plausible ambition of moving compute closer to the user is not diametrically opposed to your presumed distributed architecture.
Given that community permission for cellular sites is based on their broad public utility far outweighing the point environmental impact, in what way is this faux “debate“ not an end-run around the expensive obstacles for permission for yet another data centre?