While a few telecom networks have already parked its IT and other bits and bobs in the public cloud, this move by the Spanish group Telefonica's offspring is a world first. We're talking about an established mobile operator flipping its core network to a public cloud.

The big dogs in cloud computing, like Amazon and Microsoft, have been sniffing around the telecoms patch, tempted by a hefty pile of dosh in potential takings. However, the network bodies have been a bit iffy about whether public clouds can handle a mobile network.

The firm has a hefty 45 million customers in Germany alone, and neither AWS nor O2 Telefonica is divulging the financial details of the deal.

The core network's the beating heart of a mobile network, packed with zippy servers in data centres that securely send data and calls whizzing around. A public cloud will slash costs, beef upscale, and let them fix things without throwing a spanner in the works.

Stateside, Dish, which cobbled its mobile network from scratch, became the only telecom firm in 2021 to run its core network on the AWS cloud.

Nokia, which also participated in the Dish project, will provide the software, and AWS will build Telefonica's infrastructure.

Telefonica first had a go with AWS and Ericsson, then switched to Nokia and AWS.

The global telecom cloud market's expected to balloon to $108.7 billion by 2030 from $19.7 billion in 2021, making it a juicy prospect for firms like Amazon.