Cloud provider Packet is getting close to launching its first edge data center at a wireless tower site in Boston, operated by SBA Communications. The company is targeting launch before the end of the year.

The site will be one of the earliest operational deployments of edge computing at a cell tower and the first publicly disclosed deployment of a bare-metal cloud service in such a location – at an intersection of fiber infrastructure in the ground and wireless networks in a big metro. As such, it will be a petri dish for developing technologies, operating models, and business models that work at the edge.

It will be Packet’s new cloud availability zone, extending the company’s platform, currently hosted across 18 locations, to Boston. A longer-term target is to stand up 50 such locations, another two of them in the works in Chicago.

Edge computing holds promise of new opportunities for technology and infrastructurecompanies old and new. SBA, a nearly three-decade-old tower company, sees it as an opportunity to get into a new business – providing data center colocation services at its tower sites. For Packet, a four-year-old startup, it’s an opportunity to build a set of innovative, differentiated cloud infrastructure services at a time when the mainstream cloud market has been overtaken by giants like Amazon and Microsoft.