Microsoft previews Azure Edge Zones for 5G carriers, private networks

Although new 5G cell tower radios are capable of transmitting data at incredibly high speeds, bottlenecks elsewhere in 5G networks can prevent overall performance from being impressive, particularly for latency — the responsiveness between cloud services and client devices. So today, Microsoft is announcing Azure Edge Zones that will reduce latency for public and private networks, enabling users to take full advantage of 5G’s potential for latency-critical applications. Edge computing brings certain key resources out of centralized clouds such as Microsoft’s Azure and into one or more local points of demand — the “edge” of the cloud — to reduce data travel times between clients and networked resources. Because of the added expense of addressing individual geographies, edge computing is typically either targeted toward a very specific need for low latency, such as mixed reality, or large industrial customers with the budget to fund the new resources.