UK mobile infrastructure company Cornerstone has announced a partnership with specialist consultancy and solutions provider StonesThro to deploy micro-Edge compute capabilities.

The strategic partnership will see Cornerstone deploy a nationally distributed micro-Edge cloud infrastructure across its estate of telecoms infrastructure, which includes towers.

Cornerstone is the UK's largest tower infrastructure company in the UK with 15,700 sites across rural and urban locations.

According to Cornerstone, which was initially created as part of a UK network sharing agreement between O2 and Vodafone, the deployment of Edge sites will bolster the UK's sovereignty efforts.

The company notes that this will enable the company to deliver compute capacity closer to where it’s actually needed.

This, in theory, should allow for data to be processed nearer to where it's created and used, which Cornerstone claims will "help organizations improve response times, reduce dependency on remote platforms, and maintain greater control over sensitive information."

Cornerstone said the partnership with StonesThro will focus on how this model can be deployed at scale across the company's national estate to "create a more distributed, resilient approach to digital infrastructure in the UK."

The company said it will tap into StonesThro for its Edge cloud expertise.

"By partnering with StonesThro, we are evolving our estate from being predominantly about communication to supporting local data processing and the intelligent use of information. We are providing the ‘where’ for micro-Edge, infrastructure that is resilient, trusted, and embedded within the communities and industries it serves," said Pat Coxen, CEO, Cornerstone.

"Digital resilience is increasingly inseparable from national resilience. This partnership is about creating a living network of micro-Edge compute that delivers real-time capability without distance, delay, or dependency," added Ashley Sellar, CEO, StonesThro.

Proof-of-concept deployments are currently underway, with the aim of testing, learning, and refining how locally deployed compute can be integrated alongside existing connectivity infrastructure.

Deploying Edge compute at telecom infrastructure, such as tower masts, isn't a new thing.

Across the pond, tower companies including American Tower and SBA Communications have leveraged their respective estate of infrastructure assets to deploy Edge data centers at the base of telecom towers.