In some ways, T-Mobile has built a premiere 5G network, but it needs to persuade businesses that it’s something they need and it’s worth paying for.
Toward that end, T-Mobile on Wednesday said it’s taking its 5G Advanced Network Solutions (ANS) to the next level with a suite of end-to-end, ready-to-deploy solutions for retail, manufacturing, logistics and smart cities.
Mishka Dehghan, SVP, Strategy, Product, & Solutions Engineering at T-Mobile for Business, said what she often hears when meeting with CIOs is “'OK, 5G is great, I hear a lot about it. I just don’ know where to start.’”
Many times, T-Mobile would sit down with these customers to understand their use cases and come up with a solution, and it’s been doing this on an ad-hoc basis over the last several months, she said. So it was only natural that in the evolution of the 5G Advanced Network Solutions, they decided to package it up and do so in a way that reaches a broader group of customers.
Generally speaking, the types of solutions that businesses need can be categorized under connectivity, devices, compute and applications, she said. In each of these areas, there are hundreds of tools and options for them to choose from. But T-Mobile says it’s making it easier for them to do that.
By way of example, she pointed to a large retailer that remains unnamed due to the client’s confidentiality and competitive interests. The retailer has 2,500 stores in urban and rural areas across the country and originally wanted to know more about T-Mobile’s 5G fixed wireless access (FWA) internet solution.
“As we worked with them and we understood what they were trying to do with those connectivity needs, they quickly saw the potential” to enhance their retail footprint with things like AR products, she said.
Identifying the product would give away the identity of the customer, she said. Suffice it to say, this business wanted to give customers the ability to use AR to experience the product – a large one – when they walk into a store. “Think of it as smart retail. It’s really the digitization of retail,” she said.
Collectively, here are the connectivity options that T-Mobile is offering business and government organizations:
- T-Mobile’s 5G Advanced Network Solutions: This offers a variety of connectivity options for lower-latency and higher bandwidth – T-Mobile Public Network, a Hybrid Mobile Network and a Private Mobile Network – with the option to add compute to any of these.
- T-Mobile Business Internet: This is a 5G fixed wireless solution designed to simplify connectivity for businesses with multiple retail or office locations nationwide. It speaks to needs for speed, enhanced security and cloud-delivered managed services for configuration, monitoring and analytics.
- T IoT: T-Mobile developed this service with Deutsche Telekom; it offers an enterprise solution for global IoT connectivity, streamlining global IoT connectivity, platform management and support.
It’s all part of T-Mobile’s goal of increasing its presence in the enterprise space, one that involves doubling its market share by 2025, to about 20%. It’s currently got the lowest market share in the enterprise/government segment of the Big 3 wireless carriers.
CEO Mike Sievert has pointed out on more than one occasion that with enterprise customers, it’s a different ball game than consumer because an enterprise will check out a hundred phones and really test them out for two months. That way, T-Mobile hopes, they’ll see how much its 5G network makes a difference.
“It's exciting to talk about 5G advanced network services,” Sievert said during a Goldman Sachs investor conference earlier this month, according to a Seeking Alpha transcript. “Our competitors talk about it ad nauseam, but the core that we're all in is an important, viable, profitable business and we are taking share there and that's a big one.”