Pretty sure that you're not renting right at the tower. The provider will have an aggregation point in the middle of large metros and round-trip latency from your phone should still be under 5 ms, which is way better than going all the way to the nearest cloud datacenter. (If it was right at the tower then you'd see an order or two lower even, but I don't think that's the model being promoted). At least that's my understanding.
I like the Samsung SmartThings/AWS Lambda model for internet of things applications in most respects.
What I don't appreciate is that a light switch that is powered by AWS will sometimes fail to toggle the lights or may be a bit slow depending on the internet.
So if "edge" means having the ability to move serverless or container applications away from the cloud when that makes sense, I am all for it. That is, be able to write a lambda function and run it in a box in the office or run it in the AWS cloud.
However, if "edge" means that you pay American Tower prices to rent an "edge" server right at your cell phone tower, that seems silly in so many ways -- not least that you defeat the point of mobility just by moving to another cell tower!