Unpacking the Potential of the Connected Intelligent Edge | The Six Five Summit

Welcome to the six five Summit. This year's theme is AI Unleashed. This is the connected intelligent Edge truck, and I have the pleasure of speaking with Mike Fitz, with T-Mobile.

He leads solution sales for T-Mobile for business. But before we get started, I wanna say a little bit of context. So the theme of our discussion is unpacking the potential of the connected intelligent edge.

And certainly, T-Mobile's approach extends to users anywhere through mobility, security, and network slicing. It's a disruptive approach from my perspective, that leverages a unified 5G network and SSE for secure ubiquitous access. And so with that, Mike, let, let's jump into it.

Maybe let's start with defining the connected intelligent edge and what that means for T-Mobile and its customers. Yeah. Yeah.

Great. Well, first of all, great to be here. Great to have, uh, have this time together again.

I always enjoy doing these with you. Yeah, me too. And, uh, yeah, let's, um, let's start with what does that really mean?

And I will tell you, you know, I work for a connectivity company here at T-Mobile, so I'm a little biased on the word connected in the intelligence You sure. Are connect, intelligent edge. But, um, to me, really what it means is simply this, when you think about, um, connectivity and how important it is to underpin applications, um, it, you know, to me what connected intelligent Edge is, it's almost another way of saying, you know, maybe network as a service.

We sometimes talk about it, but it's really about how do we take what somebody like AWS and Azure and G CCP have done in the compute space and do the same thing in the connectivity space, create that, uh, sort of ultra flexibility, reliability, stability, security for connectivity, um, to, you know, underpin and support applications in the same way those guys do. So to me, that's really what, um, that connected intelligent Edge is all about. No, it makes perfect sense, Mike.

And, you know, I think one of the challenges, you know, CIOs are faced with just, uh, a number of challenges with disaggregated infrastructure, with ai, with protecting AI and, and, and all of that. And so we, you know, from your perspective in speaking with your customers, I mean, where, where does this whole notion of connected intelligent Edge fall within the priority rankings of, of all these other things that they're dealing with? Well, it's certainly, it's certainly important to them, but, um, you know, I always think about it this way.

At the end of the day, one of the biggest jobs of A CIO is deploying applications. It's solving their business problems using technology. And many times that really manifests itself in the form of the applications they deploy.

And, and given that, I would argue that so much else that they do, whether it's connectivity, security, even ai, all those things are really just a means to an end, a means to deliver a more robust, disruptive, innovative, reductive application that really Yeah. Drives their business forward. So, yes, something like the connected intelligent edge is very important to CIOs, but in the context of it's a means to an end.

And I think we never, we should never forget that when we're in this business. Yeah. Because I will tell you, I had not yet walked into an EBC or a customer meeting, uh, where a customer says to me, Hey, you know, if I can just buy more 5G Sims today, it'll be a great day.

Right? That doesn't happen. Um, you know, they walk in and they wanna solve their problems, right?

They want to create value company, and, uh, and we can be a means to help them do that. Yeah. And I love, I love the, the fact that you pointed to like business outcome, right?

This isn't about, you know, collecting technology, it's about driving better business outcomes and, and really enhancing the overall customer experience, right? And that is something that, you know, and I followed, you know, T-Mobile for many, many years, and that is something that you're relentlessly focused on. You have been in consumer and you're building that beachhead in, uh, in business as well.

But, you know, when you sort of talk about the network edge, I mean, lots of people define it differently. You know, I've, I've heard that then near far, and I'm wondering from your perspective, how, how far does T-Mobile's edge extend? Well, you know, the way I think about the definition of the edge is, um, I actually don't think I get to define it anymore.

And I don't think CIOs get to define it. I think it's being defined by our end users. Um, and those end users could be our employees, they could be our customers, they could be our partners, our vendors, you name it.

They're defining the edge now, right? I mean, the old days where we used to, you know, I've been in this business like you a long time and the old days where we used to def, you know, define a box of, Hey, here's your MPLS core and your apps are gonna run in there. Those days are gone.

Um, our users now demand, right? I wanna work mobilely, I wanna work at home. And I think, frankly, the connected edge is wherever they take us, and we have to embrace it.

I mean, we can, of course we can control that to a degree, and we know that. Um, but if you want to create the, the value and really satisfy those end users, that connected edge has to extend where they, where they want to be. And that does mean giving them their, their business applications at home, giving it to them on the road in a hotel, on an airplane, wherever they are.

We, uh, we, we need to figure out how we meet them there and provide what I said earlier, that, you know, resiliency, stability, security, et cetera, in that connectivity wherever they are. Yeah. You know, it's, it's meeting customers where they are.

Right. Yeah. And, and I know that the company, you've spoken a lot around, you know, kind of the flexibility that 5G provides and the ability to support work from anywhere.

And certainly we, we live in a hybrid work world now where, you know, I think telecom before the pandemic was a nice to have, and now it's, it's sort of table stakes, right? Yeah. Yeah.

And it's important to be able to meet customers where they're at. Um, specifically, can, can you speak to what T-Mobile is doing to embrace that idea of meeting users where they work? Is there anything that you're doing from the way that you're architecting the network deployment or the way that you're, you know, you're delivering applications or, or security that, that support that?

'cause security's a huge issue too, Right? Yeah, no, it is, it's, it's key to that. No, for sure.

Um, well, I tell you, um, we, we've sort of embraced, um, this idea that I actually think is fairly unique and, uh, and actually a little bit disruptive in the way we've been doing networks our whole careers. And it's this idea that, uh, I've been calling the flat network, and the concept is that, um, we can, we can once for the first time, I think ever frankly, connect our users of our applications, um, no matter what persona they may be, um, to the same network all the time. And you may say, well, wait a minute, that have, have we, have we been doing that?

Um, and what does that mean? Well, I would say, no, we haven't been doing that. Um, in fact, we connect to different networks all the time.

I mean, I, I know you're traveling right now and, uh, I think you might even be in a hotel, I'm not sure, but I am, I am. You, You probably are given your schedule. Um, but think about your travels in the last, you know, since you left home to go out there on that trip, how many different networks have you been connected to?

Right? You were on your home network, you were in an Uber, maybe on, on your mobile network, you were in an airport, you were, uh, on an airplane. Maybe that's four, a hotel is five, the convention, that's six, right?

If you go see another customer ride out there, that's seven lots of different networks. And every one of those networks has different performance, uh, characteristics, different reliability characteristics, different security profiles, right? Yeah.

It's very unpredictable. And what we are unlocking here, and I think is pretty exciting, is this idea that with 5G cellular, uh, really cellular, but 5G in particular, and I'll talk about how private networks play into this in a minute. Yeah.

All three of the personas as I describe them, of a user, and I, when I say personas, I'm not talking about a technology persona, but how they think about consuming work and consuming applications by, and by those personas, I mean, when they're working in the office, when they're at home, or when they're basically anywhere else, which is mobile, because that's how they think about consumption. Yeah. For the first time ever, we can provide a single network that can connect them in all three personas, 24 7.

Um, we do that, you know, at at T-Mobile, we're really good at doing that. Mobilely, that's what people know us for, right? Yeah.

Uh, we've also been crushing the home and business, um, internet space with our fixed wireless products, right? We're, we've been doing about half a million devices a quarter in an industry that's doing about 800,000. And that I'm not talking fixed wireless, I'm talking overall internet connections, right?

Sure. Crushing that space. So we've built a strong foothold there.

And now with our, you know, sort of private 5G options, which we can talk about in a minute. Um, yep. We now covered the workspace as well.

So again, uh, for the first time ever, we create this architecture where you can be connected to one network all the time. And what does that mean? Why is that so important?

Because I can provide you SLAs, I can provide you performance guarantees, I can give you predictable speeds, latency, um, traffic filtering, consumption models, uh, segmentation of traffic locations where traffic terminates, all these things that you can only do in a single network if you're connected to that single network all the time. Yeah. We can do that for you.

And that is incredibly powerful because today, what do you have to do as a CIO to make applications perform? You have to predict what are those seven networks that my users are gonna be on over the next, uh, week, right. And how can I build my application to the least common denominator to perform?

Right? That's what we have to do. The network doesn't work for us.

We make an application work despite the network. And so with our model, with this whole flat network architecture, I think we unlock something pretty exciting. Yeah.

And, and a first in the industry, um, by disrupting this whole wan lan wifi model that's been forever. And we, uh, we find it pretty exciting, actually. Uh, It is.

And, you know, you're, you're optimizing for, for the best user experience again, right? Yeah. You're not, you're not having to, to your employee focus on the least common denominator.

Right. The other super powerful thing about what you're creating with this unified flat network from my perspective, is when you have one network, you don't manage a bunch of overlays, you have consistent policy constructs for security. Yeah.

Yeah. And so think about that scenario that we were just walking through. I mean, you know, that, that that connectivity at a hotel is pretty porous, right?

I mean, that attack surface is quite large, and that could be the point where a bad actor has already entered the network and is moving laterally and then, you know, game over. So you're only strong as, as your weakest link, right? Absolutely.

Yeah. That's what I find super Powerful. No, and that's exactly what I meant by you.

You know, you build applications and you build connectivity to the least common denominator in your example, that hotel wifi could very well be it. Um, so No, you're absolutely right. Yeah.

Well, any, like, we've been, you know, you've mentioned private a couple of times. Yeah. Um, it's super exciting.

You know, traditionally cellular has been used as a redundant backup and, and enterprise deployments and, and that sort of thing. It's, it's becoming the primary modality, especially in operational technology environments Yeah. Areas that have been traditionally unconnected.

Um, where does T-Mobile see private networking play a role? And also I'd like you to go a little deeper into how you're approaching it, because from my perspective, um, we haven't seen the hockey stick on adoption. And one of the reasons why is that there are so many different ways to get there as a service, a network slice on a public network in a box from a solution, and then the whole notion of licensed spectrum, how you manage all that.

And yeah. And so I, I'd love you to spend some time on T-Mobile's approach and, and how you're trying to simplify that whole process for your customers. Oh, well, it's a great question, and I can't tell you that we or anybody yet has, uh, greatly solved this or simplified it such that there's one answer.

'cause there is no, uh, honestly no single answer this yet. But I can certainly answer from the perspective of, um, how I think most customers are looking at it today. And I will tell you, it is one of the reasons why private networks and the whole idea is so exciting to us, is it is that sort of that anchor that unlocks this whole flat network architecture because yeah, up until now, the, the domain of the workplace has been dominated by sort of legacy WANs and wifi networks and lands in those buildings, right?

And so when you start to put 5G in those buildings, cellular in there, and that becomes the primary means of connectivity, right? So that you're on for, in my case, I have my connected laptop I'm on right now, I'm connected to 5G here, I'm connected when I go home. I'm connected in the hotel, I'm connected everywhere no matter what I'm doing.

Right? So that is a big unlock for that flat network story. But to your point, private means a lot of things to a lot of people.

And, um, I think there was a period of time we went through thinking private 5G meant, you know, air gapped separate networks, right? And we gotta put our secure and mission critical stuff over here. And honestly, that is, um, that is a use case, but a real niche use case.

I'm fi we're finding Yeah. The biggest use case we're finding is we, we have embraced the idea that really what we're doing for our customers is purpose building 5G. That is really sort of what we've embraced, because what we find most customers really want is they just want a highly reliable, high performing network that is everywhere and they don't have to worry about gaps, right.

Which you often have in a wifi network. I mean, yeah, you can certainly build out in, in densify your wifi access points, um, and do a much better job. But it's not easy.

Um, it's not easy to ever get every No, It might also not be cost efficient as well, right? It it may not be. Yeah.

And you may not have a practical way to light up the outdoors area of a campus, right? Yeah. And so, um, they really just want really good coverage, but it may be coverage that we as carriers aren't willing to provide at no cost for one thing.

Yeah. Right. Like, for example, one of the universities we, we lit up, um, actually had really good T-Mobile coverage, um, better than the other two carriers at this particular university.

And they were really happy with it. But when they decided they wanted to give every matriculating, uh, or incoming freshman and an iPad as a benefit of going to that university, they said, Hey, if this is really gonna work, we need every nook and cranny of this place covered the basement of the library, right? The last warm at the end of the campus places that we didn't have great coverage, honestly, nobody did.

So we went in and supplemented the public coverage with private coverage, but it really was performing the same as the public. Um, it was just purpose built coverage, providing an enhanced experience, but it created so much value for that university that they were willing to, uh, you know, let us monetize that because it's, they knew it was something we wouldn't have needed to really build otherwise, right. If it weren't to solve this specific, uh, problem for them.

So, um, yeah, so I think in most cases, what private 5G sometimes we call it hybrid 5G is really coming to mean for our customers is give me a better network that addresses some of the shortcomings we've seen historically, maybe in wifi. Mm-Hmm. Yeah.

And let it perform. And, and we've talked about a couple of those examples here, you know, augmenting, um, you know, the example I often use with customers that sometimes resonates when I talk about wifi is I think of, uh, you know, I think of coverage at a campus or any location, like think about a a gallon jug. And when you fill that gallon jug up with golf balls, think of those golf balls as wifi coverage, a a sphere of wifi coverage.

And of course, what's the, the space between the balls? That's where you don't have coverage, right? Right.

Yeah. And then what 5G does for you, I think of 5G, the 5G coverage is a basketball that just envelops the whole jug, right? Yeah.

Yeah. And that's, That's sort of the analogy that's resonated with a lot of our customers. And we sometimes do see a 10 or 15 to 20 to one radio, radio, uh, ratio, um, that does provide indeed that that better coverage.

Well, I like that analogy. I, I'm a baseball fan. Maybe next time we can talk about, all right, how many baseballs?

Very Good. It's probably actually a better analogy 'cause you probably get closer to the 10 or 15 to one than golf, but yeah, we'll do that next. Yeah.

Like as we, as we sort of wind things, uh, um, I know, so we've spent some time sort of talking about the flat network concept, and I think you did a, an excellent job of sort of describing, you know, the different connections that have to be made there. But, um, from your perspective, I mean, can you describe, you know, how, you know, you know, customers can sort of improve the user experience. I mean, can you point to a specific example?

And it may, it may be consumers, but it may be consumers or, you know, customers of, of your business clients within the T-Mobile for business, uh, uh, company. Um, So yeah, I mean, we have a lot of you great use cases across different industries, but I think one that really demonstrates, I think the real power of this flat network concept. I described bringing home the idea of working at home and working mobilely and working at a, at a a work location.

Um, in this case, let's take a hospital. So, you know, we have a customer of ours, uh, up in Boston who asked us to build out a, uh, build out their hospital with a private 5G system. Right?

Again, they were that epitome of a customer who needed ultra reliability. If you're gonna run an epic application there, you and you're gonna push alerts and so forth, you cannot miss messages, you cannot miss calls, et cetera. Yeah.

Et cetera. So the business case, the cost benefit proved out all day long to build a, a private 5G network for that. But the example here that I think it unlocks as we start to lean into SASS e and ultimately network slicing and we think about what it means to now have that coverage in the hospital and at home and at and mobilely for those nurses that are using it, imagine the scenario where the nurse is in the hospital working and when that device the nurse is using is connected to the private system, because we know the radio, the nurse is connected to, because we know their location, we know that they're in the persona of they are working and therefore they're working as a nurse.

So therefore we're gonna connect them with a higher priority. Yeah. We're gonna give 'em, uh, minimum speeds, we're gonna give 'em better latency and we're gonna route their traffic out a different path.

Not to the public internet, but to their private data center in Boston and the other data center up in Wisconsin. Okay? Sure.

Yeah. Now that same nurse leaves is off work, goes out to dinner, meet his or her spouse, right? They've now fallen back to being a consumer again, essentially with that device.

Right? So now, because we know they're not on the clock, they're not at the location anymore, um, we, we treat them like a consumer, they fall back to normal priority on the network. We begin to route their traffic once again to the internet just like any other consumer.

Yeah. And now let's take the third scenario where that that nurse goes home while they're still on their consumer mode. So we continue to treat 'em like a consumer.

But imagine the world where we have built integration into with APIs, which we are building, and the APIs hook into that, uh, hospital systems, let's say workday, um, scheduling system. And we know at midnight that nurse is actually on call. And because we cannot have that nurse miss anything, we at midnight, we elevate the status of that connection to again, provide a higher quality, um, a higher priority on the network and all the characteristics that make sure that connection is treated like it should be a nurse who's on call who is being relied upon to be at the beck and call of his or her patients.

Yeah. Right. That example I just gave can only come to life when that device is connected to the same network.

Yeah. With the same policy being applied to it based on context. And I just gave you an example where that device was connected in the workplace, the hospital when they were mobilely at dinner, mobile at dinner, and when they were at home, right.

Both at home as a consumer and a mom and a dad or as a nurse on call it, to me that is incredibly powerful and exciting and really unlocks this vision that I described of this flat net network architecture. Yeah. You know, and it totally drives home the whole notion of intelligence and connectivity Yes.

At the edge of the network as well. Yeah. So, Mike, that was stupendous well done, my friend with, with that we're, I've got a final, um, question for you as, as we close, and I think this is the, the, the the million dollar question.

What advice would you give executives that are looking to embrace this whole notion of the T-Mobile for business flat network? Yeah. Look, you know, I, I will tell you it probably starts with understanding what are you, what are you trying to do with it?

Um, what is your, you know, when you, we all look at cost benefit analysis, but what's the benefit and what are we trying to get at? What problem are we trying to solve? I've talked to another, a number of customers that come in and say, Hey, we heard about this private 5G thing, tell me about it.

And we talk about it, but there's not a use case. Um, there's not a problem we're trying to solve and it doesn't go anywhere. So no, we gotta know our use cases first and foremost.

And then the flip side of any cost benefit analysis is what is your TCO and your current networks? Um, we've run into that too, where, you know, customers say, Hey, I really like this, but I don't know if I can justify the network, uh, spend to upgrade from wifi to 5G. And we go round and round.

'cause look, we've done this enough times now that we know the costs involved. And I'll tell you, I have a, I've had a number of customers come back to me and say, well, here's my cost for running wifi. And I look at it and then they've missed, you know, half the cost that they're incurring that they're, you know, right.

When I pointed out, they're like, oh yeah, you're right. I forgot about that. Oh yeah, I forgot about that.

So, right. Um, we, we, we've taken it for granted, I think sometimes what our costs are. So understanding that that TCO is so important as well.

Yeah. Um, and then just, you know, doing our homework. 'cause you're right, you asked a great question earlier, which is, what are all these permutations of 5G private, 5G, what does it mean?

And is slicing on a macro a private Well, the answer to all those questions is yes, and yes and yes. Right. It's, it mean anything and anything and there's no wrong answer here.

So do your homework. Understand what is CBRS versus private spectrum and why is private gonna offer you some benefits maybe that sometimes that CBRS can't and what's the difference between an air gap private network or a pure macro network extension like we did for the hospital or a hybrid that's somewhat in between. Right.

And so it's really just you educating and certainly at T-Mobile we do that a lot. We're happy to do that and um, would love to support that. And, and I will tell you, wifi plays a big role still.

It's not going away anytime soon for our implementations. We keep wifi and we'll use it for guest wifi, a guest access or even a failover sometimes. Yeah, right.

Yeah. Why you aren't, it's there, it still works. We use it.

So, uh, just my advice would be, you know, just get educated, reach out, um, to companies like us, T-Mobile and others, and, uh, and learn how you can apply this to, you know, propel your business as well. Yeah, that's great. Mike.

You know, I, I love how T-Mobile for business is meeting customers where they're at. To your point, one size doesn't often fit all in workload application set. Um, campus branch, remote work environment drives, um, a a lot of this.

So, um, you know, really, really sage advice and, um, I always enjoy our, our conversations and I hope we continue this in, into the future. But you know, again, thanks for your time and I want to thank our viewers for tuning in as well to this connected intelligent session. Check out, um, all of the sessions that are going on, not only within the connected intelligence edge, but we've got cybersecurity, we've got automation, we've got a whole host more.

So with that, Mike, thanks again and uh, thank you Will to our viewers, uh, have a great time.