Enabling Enterprise Agility at the Edge: The Next Frontier in 5G ANS Networking

What’s powering the next wave of enterprise agility? ⚡It’s not just AI—it’s AI + 5G at the edge.

At The Six Five Summit: AI Unleashed, our Day 2 Intelligent Edge Track Opener Mike Fitz, Vice President of Solution Sales and Indirect Channels at T-Mobile for Business joins host Will Townsend for a pivotal discussion on the future of enterprise connectivity.

Key takeaways include:

🔹5G's Impact on Enterprise Agility: Explore the profound effects of 5G on enterprise networking, revealing how it's empowering businesses with new levels of speed, responsiveness, and operational flexibility.

🔹Unlocking Edge Opportunities with 5G: Delve into the exciting new opportunities 5G creates for businesses operating at the edge, enabling innovations from real-time analytics to enhanced remote operations.

🔹Facilitating Edge Connectivity: Understand the role T-Mobile for Business is playing in delivering robust and reliable enterprise connectivity solutions, bridging the gap between cutting-edge technology and practical deployment.

🔹Navigating Deployment Challenges: Gain insights into the common challenges and effective strategies for successfully deploying complex edge computing and 5G solutions within a demanding enterprise environment.

Learn more at T-Mobile For Business.

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Or listen to the audio here:‍

Will Townsend: Welcome to the Six Five Summit: AI Unleashed. I'm Will Townsend. I lead the security networking practices for Moor Insights & Strategy and I'm joined by Mike Fitz. He's the Vice President of Solution Sales and Indirect Channels for T-Mobile for Business. And in this session, we're going to discuss the evolution of the edge and its impact on 5G networking, agility, and intelligent connectivity. Mike, it's always a pleasure to chat with you. We've done several of these over the years, haven't we?

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Mike Fitz: Yeah, we have. It's been fun, Will. So I appreciate the opportunity. I appreciate you having me back.

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Will Townsend: Yeah, likewise. I always learn something new when we talk, but let's get started and let's talk about defining the term edge. There's near edge, there's far edge, there's fat edge, there's thin edge. What does it really mean from your perspective and why is it important to businesses right now?

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Mike Fitz: Yeah. No, great question. Look, and I think defining this is probably more important than ever as we move into the world of AI and agentic AI specifically. And to me, really what edge means is it's less of a technical concept to me and more about where does work get done.

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Will Townsend: Yeah.

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Mike Fitz: Where are we working? For me, it's right here on my connected laptop, it's my mobile phone, it's at my house, it's wherever I want to work. For agentic AI, it's the same. It could be a robot, it could be a car, it could be a contact center application being used by a care representative sitting at home. It could be any of those things. And so, to me, the edge of the network is where work gets done. And I think in some ways, the classic definition that many carry around thinking, well, edge means the edge of the provider's network or the edge of my corporate network, I think, is a little bit ill-defined and a little misleading, actually, because that's limiting, frankly. And I think we just need to blow up that concept a little bit and just acknowledge, hey, where work is done is where we need compute and where we need network, and that's the end of the story. And we need enough at both of those places, so it just works, right?

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Will Townsend: Yeah, no. Yeah.

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Mike Fitz: And I think, well, even more importantly, when I think about what's needed to make agentic AI work, it's obviously the compute, but, of course, network. And we're going to talk about that a little bit today. And it's not so much about faster, better, lower latency networks, any of that. It's not necessarily about even faster compute. It's about providing a predictable connectivity experience where computing exists. To me, that's what it's about. I read an article the other day, actually, it was pretty fascinating, but it was a study done by MIT where they were studying the reaction time of humans to driving situations and how quickly humans reacted to things like a deer running out in front of them or seeing something on the road or a car cutting them off, whatever it may be, right?

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And what they found was, this was interesting to me, what they found was the average human reaction time from seeing the obstacle to reacting to the obstacle, either through steering wheel or brake input, was about half a second. So 400 to 600 milliseconds is actually what their study said. And I was thinking about that and I was like, you know what, if you use that metric and you said, "Well, could the cloud providers and a 5G network or even a 4G network provide consistent performance in delivering an application less than or can it provide an application of less than 400 milliseconds?", yeah, it absolutely can. There's no doubt it can. We know AWS is an example of performance better than that. We know 5G is better than that.

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Will Townsend: Yeah.

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Mike Fitz: The question really is, can it do it in a consistent and predictive way, such that, well, when you're driving down the road with your family, you know that you're going to get the right response time to keep you safe. That's really the question to me is how can networking that underpins AI applications, especially agentic AI, provide that predictable experience to deliver this agentic AI in a way that we're all comfortable?

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Will Townsend: No, you're solid. You're dead on on that, Mike, and you need that reliability to facilitate automation at scale. When you look at drone connectivity, I know T-Mobile is involved with something through T-Mobile Ventures there.

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Mike Fitz: Yeah.

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Will Townsend: When you look at just autonomous driving and that sort of thing. So you need to have that reliable, that low latency, that predictable throughput to do all of that. And the edge is becoming redefined. I mean, Edge AI is a big subject of conversation right now as generative and agentic move from cloud-hosted larger language models to smaller language models that reside on the network edge. And I also love your definition. It's where stuff gets done. It's where data gets created. So with that context, and it's obvious the benefits for mobile network operators like T-Mobile in providing consistency with subscriber services and that sort of thing, but what do you see as some additional opportunities with this whole notion of Edge AI?

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Mike Fitz: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I think Edge AI is really pushing us to all perform and deliver that consistent experience, because as Edge AI becomes an everyday capability you and I use and devices use, whether it's autonomous vehicles, robotics, you name it, the examples I gave earlier, we're going to need a network that underpins that and makes it work. And we've been thinking a lot about that here at T-Mobile. I talked to a lot of customers and I really believe, Will, there's a paradigm shift coming in networking. Something that ... Look, you and I have been doing this a long time. I've been in the networking world now 30 years, just celebrated my 30-year anniversary here at T-Mobile last week.

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Will Townsend: Congratulations.

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Mike Fitz: Thank you. And I've seen a lot of evolution in networks. I've seen capabilities come and go and I think we're on the verge of another paradigm shift. And here's what I mean. When you think about the way we have built and managed networks, going back to the beginning of time, it really was built on this fundamental idea of we have a WAN model and we have a LAN model.

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Will Townsend: Yeah.

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Mike Fitz: And nobody ever said, by the way, in a Six Five Summit 30 years ago, if it existed, that, "Hey, having this bifurcated network structure is a good thing and let's just fundamentally have different technologies that we have to bridge together and make it all work."

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Will Townsend: Right.

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Mike Fitz: Being a little facetious here. Nobody ever said that. It's just the way technology evolved and we still fundamentally use it today, for the most part. I mean, we're sitting here ... You're probably sitting on a LAN network right now, or a WAN, a Wi-Fi network in wherever you are, hotel room there, wherever it is you are.

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Will Townsend: Yeah. I'm in San Diego and I'm on a hotel Wi-Fi.

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Mike Fitz: Yeah, there you go. Exactly. And that paradigm has been around forever. The challenge we have with that model is when we think about important critical use cases of agentic AI or any application for that matter, the model we've used, where no matter where you work, you could be on a different network, doesn't help us. I mean, think about all the different networks that you sit on, all of us sit on throughout the course of the day. I mean, you might be on your home network in the morning, and then you travel, and you're in airport Wi-Fi, and then you get to your hotel, you're on hotel Wi-Fi, and then you see a customer, you're on their Wi-Fi. And then in between all that, you're mobile. I mean, you could be on five or six different networks all day long. And if I get to the point I made earlier, which is you need a predictive network, you're getting anything but that.

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Will Townsend: Yeah.

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Mike Fitz: In fact, who knows what ... I mean, I'm sure you're in a great hotel, Will, I know you, but who knows what Wi-Fi they're running? Who knows what ISP they're using? Does that ISP buy directly from a carrier? Do they buy transit to a Tier 1 ISP? How is this hosted session we're having right now getting to the cloud? Is it through a peering point? Are they direct connected? We don't know.

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Will Townsend: Yeah.

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Mike Fitz: So what does all this mean when you write applications? It means up until now, we've written applications despite the network and we write applications to overcome the network. I mean, this is why the term store and forward applications got invented, right? Why did you have to store them forward? Because you couldn't count on the network.

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Will Townsend: Yeah. And there's a whole host of digital experience monitoring applications to ensure you've got the right level of connectivity because there's all that inconsistency, right?

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Mike Fitz: Exactly. So for all of time, I would argue we've generally written applications despite the network. That's it. I'll just leave it at that.

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Will Townsend: Sure.

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Mike Fitz: And overcoming the network, whether it's performance or even security. I mean, look at the whole world of security and VPN clients, and everything else, we've built a ride over those networks as opposed to trusting the network itself. And that's why, to me, this paradigm shift is this, Will, to say it concisely. I think the shift is one where we are going to pivot to a national network. Almost think of it like that. The easiest way I describe it sometimes to people is think of it as if Wi-Fi went national. Imagine if you could have one bubble of coverage. Now Wi-Fi can't do that by definition, but cellular can.

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Will Townsend: Yeah.

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Mike Fitz: And cellular does that today. It provides a national network, but there's some gaps with that. And so what I want to talk to you about is what I think are how we're closing those gaps and going to potentially be able to realize this vision of a single network. We here at T-Mobile are calling this concept the flat network concept because we're flattening all those network archetypes that I talked about already, right? From access points, Wi-Fi access points, the switches, the routers, the ISPs, and all that flat net to a single network. And we think that is a cellular network, but supplemented with a couple things. And so I would argue there's four ingredients to this paradigm shift that I think is going to transform networking and potentially be the network of the future. The four ingredients are, number one, a nationwide network, and that is the only one that can reach endpoints nationwide. And this important distinction, these endpoints right here, is the cellular network today, right? No other network reaches endpoints. 

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All other networks out there today, WAN, wide area networks, get to sites, and then you have last mile connectivity, be it Wi-Fi, ethernet, whatever it may be, CBRS, you name it. Cellular is the only nationwide endpoint network. Now ... So that's step one. You need a nationwide endpoint network. Now, you might say your first reaction to that would be, "Okay, sounds good," but you don't have coverage everywhere. So how could this be nationwide?

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Will Townsend: Yeah.

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Mike Fitz: We don't. You're right, there's small parts of the country where we don't have coverage, but those could be important parts that you need, like an elevator shaft in a hospital. And if a nurse needs 100% coverage, that's not going to work. So the second ingredient that we carriers have been focusing on, and in particular here at T-Mobile, we call it our ANS platform, Advanced Network Solutions, is building purpose-built coverage, we call it, to supplement that nationwide network and fill in any of those spots you need for your business operations. That could be filling in that hospital so that you've got coverage in not only the elevator shaft but the basement floors, the broom closet, everywhere you need coverage, an oil field where you need remote operations, you name it. Just filling in that coverage. That's the second piece.

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And with that, you can get all the places you do business covered. The third element, though, and this is arguably the most important, Will, is overlaying onto that network, whether it's our 90,000 cell sites that cover the country nationally or the purpose-built coverage we've augmented for that business. Overlaying onto that, all the capabilities that really a 5G SA network brings, which most notably slicing, to provide what I set up earlier, which is that predictive experience. That is key in this to me, that you can know that, hey, if I'm running this application and let's say it's the latest agentic application, I'm running on my phone and I'm running a local inference engine on my phone, and that thing only works when I get this predictive performance, we can apply a slice to your connection. It gives you that predictive performance no matter where you are located. And that could be you're running on our macro network at any part of this country or you're running on the purpose-built coverage we delivered for you. It doesn't matter where you are, we can provide that predictive performance.

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That, to me, Will, is an unlock here that is going to be the key to this transformation. Add to that, local breakout and APNs and, of course, SASE, and all the other capabilities that we can add, and that slicing combined with purpose-built coverage combined with the macro network. And then the fourth thing, by the way, is wrapping all that with a platform or portal that manages it all for you so you can set up and give priority. That combination, I think, is going to be the network of the future that is going to unlock the way we deliver applications.

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Will Townsend: Yeah, no, I completely agree. And the deterministic nature of taking cellular connectivity and slicing, by the way, you can only do that with a standalone network that marries core infrastructure, 5G core infrastructure, with 5G ran infrastructure. And not to be too gratuitous with the plug, but T-Mobile has been the first to standalone with a nationwide network, and that's driving tremendous business value from my perspective. But you touched on security, and I know that T-Mobile has done some very innovative things with slicing and security and that sort of thing. Let's spend a little bit of time there because security is very important when you think about this ... Cellular networks in general, the threat surface is tremendous because you have so many subscribers. You've got so many services that are hanging off that network. Your vision of going to that ubiquitous network, that's going to create a massive threat surface. So speak a little bit about how T-Mobile for Business is addressing that. 5G New Radio brings great encryption improvements over LTE, but more is needed. So what are your thoughts?

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Mike Fitz: Yeah, no, absolutely. Here's what's cool about it. Yeah, you're right, 5G standalone, 5G New Radio does bring a lot more encryption all the way down to the device that you don't have in LTE networks today or hybrid 5G LTE networks, but 5G standalone brings that. So no question that is a big benefit of it, but really, this whole notion of slicing is unlocking a lot of things for us. And security is a big one. The ability to encapsulate traffic as it goes across the network, create that VPN experience, Will, I almost liken what's happening in 5G SA with slicing and security, again, I'm going to harken back to our old network days, to what MPLS did for the internet almost 20 years ago.

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When you think about the internet, when the internet came about, everybody loved the internet, of course, and still does, but if I'm talking in a business world, everybody loved the internet coming about because it scaled, it was less expensive, gave me great access to anywhere I wanted to go. But what network operators quickly found out was, hey, the internet's wide open and you know what I miss about my old Frame Relay and ATM and X.25 networks is I miss those private connections. The ability to set up a circuit from point A to point B that I knew was secure.

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Will Townsend: Yeah.

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Mike Fitz: And so MPLS in many ways came about to address that. Yes, it also addressed performance and gave a little more quality of service capability as well. But the ability to encapsulate that data, overlay it onto the internet and provide that same VPN experience, like the VPN-like experience that those other technologies provided, is really what unlocked the internet for business. And MPLS was born and companies still use it today. And I like in slicing, slicing is to 5G in its many ways for business like MPLS was to internet, slicing now allows us to create that business environment and make our backbone and all the endpoint devices connected to our backbone run like and operate like they're in their own private network, essentially. And the slicing can encapsulate that traffic, create that same quality of service and predictable experience, just like, in many ways, MPLS did. Now, of course, MPLS was very limited in that it dumped the traffic off in your corporate LAN, and from there, who knows where it went. You had to manage that separately.

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The beauty of this is, it's all the way to the endpoint, end to end network capability, endpoint to endpoint with security encryption end to end and creating a tunnel that provides that security and that quality of service from endpoint to endpoint. That's pretty compelling. And, of course, in everything in between, which includes our data centers, our cloud services and everything else. Yeah.

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Will Townsend: Well, I mean, it's super compelling because it ensures consistency. So you can do that anywhere. And given how disaggregated infrastructure is in general and how we work today, I mean, we're beyond the pandemic, obviously, but we're working from branch locations, campus locations, you're needing to connect operational technology connectivity that's been fraught with a mishmash of different modalities and, really, a 5G standalone network with nationwide coverage can address that. But let's talk a little bit about use cases, Mike. So this whole vision that T-Mobile for Business has with this ubiquitous network, what are some of the use cases that are bubbling up?

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Mike Fitz: Yeah. Well, there's a lot of use cases and we're having a lot of success right now. It's growing pretty rapidly. But let me just share one particular use case that I think really brings to light this concept that I'm talking about, and I've shared it with other customers and they have that aha moment of I get it now, what you mean by combining macro with local coverage and slicing over the top. And it's a use case from a customer of ours, a hospital. And in this particular case, they were using Wi-Fi for their nurses running Epic, which some of you will know it from My Chart.

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That's the consumer facing side with your doctor. And Epic is the application on the backend. And it just wasn't performing so well on their Wi-Fi. And as a result, there were modules in Epic that they hadn't even deployed yet because they couldn't rely on it. And as you can imagine, certain modules like the patient alerting and things, you need to make sure they're going to be received if you're going to run those modules on your mobile phone. So we designed for them a purpose-built 5G coverage experience for their hospital where we blanketed every square inch of that hospital, including basement, broom closet, you name it. And then, of course, it's the same coverage that we provide all across the country, but we overlay that then with everything I've been talking about in the slicing world.

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And here's what slicing can do. So imagine this use case, this is how powerful this is and how this works. So imagine a nurse is in a hospital, it's 3:00 p.m., they're working, and they're running Epic. And because of the time of day it is and the location of that nurse's device, we know collectively, we, T-Mobile, and the customer knows that nurse is working as a nurse. She's in their nurse persona right now. So we can dynamically apply a slice, which is, again, a slice is nothing more than tuning the parameters of our network for that device at that point in time, be it speed, latency, priority, routing, filtering, all the parameters of a connection, we can tune it. So for that nurse in the middle of the afternoon, her device is tuned into a slice for her business persona as a nurse, which means she gets priority on the network instance in the hospital. And why is that important? Because we don't ever want her missing an alert because the kid in the waiting room down the hall is playing Fortnite with his three buddies. And this is very real, right?

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Will Townsend: That's real. I'm laughing because I have two daughters that are into online gaming.

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Mike Fitz: Yeah, exactly, right. So you know. So she will get priority over anybody else, any other 5G or T-Mobile connected devices. We will also give her minimum bandwidth to ensure the app works, everything that needs the apps to work. We will also route her traffic uniquely to their data center, not the internet, directly to her data center.

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Will Townsend: Very important for healthcare and privacy and HIPAA compliance and all of that.

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Mike Fitz: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Very important. And we can filter out the traffic that they don't want if they don't want the nurse watching Netflix during the day, whatever. We can do whatever we want on that connection, but most importantly, it's quality of service, it's priority, and it's routing of secure traffic while that device is at work. Now imagine the nurse gets off her shift at 6:00, goes out to dinner with her husband, they get to the restaurant. That same phone is now in a restaurant still connected to T-Mobile to the same network, but because we know the nurse is off work now, we can flip that phone back to being just a regular old consumer phone, which means no more priority than anybody else in the restaurant.

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Traffic gets routed to the internet and it functions just like a consumer phone. Cool, right? Now, she goes home, she's at home now. Now she's on a different T-Mobile macro cell tower and no priority. She is watching Netflix at 9:00 p.m. and she's competing with the neighbors in the neighborhood for air time, which hopefully is performing well, I hope our T-Mobile network performs well in her neighborhood, but it's routing to the internet and she's just like every other consumer in that neighborhood.

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Will Townsend: Yeah.

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Mike Fitz: Now at 11:00 p.m., she goes on call. And when she goes on call at 11:00 p.m., once again, she's in her nurse persona and she needs better performance and routing of traffic. And even though she's not even at the hospital, she's still on the T-Mobile macro network, which we don't differentiate where she's located, we apply that same slice to her and now she gets priority, and not over the kids in the waiting room, but kids down the street watching videos and playing games and whatever else in her neighborhood.

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Will Townsend: Right.

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Mike Fitz: And we route her traffic just the same to their data center and it never touches the public internet. This is what the power of slicing and a nationwide network can do when you treat it as such and manage devices and applications all the way to the endpoint. And I think those kinds of use cases, we're finding our killer use cases where it goes in and out of local and mobile locations, this is where this concept thrives.

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Will Townsend: It really does. I mean, it's intelligent routing. It removes all the friction. You don't have to manage eSIM or multiple physical SIMs in a device and it just works. And then it really just ... It demonstrates the true value, I think, of what 5G can deliver. And you have to have standalone to get there and it's super compelling from my perspective.

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Mike Fitz: No, absolutely. And I'll tell you what, another example, just a personal one here. I'm sitting on my laptop with you right now connected to 5G, my 5G connected laptop. And I'll tell you how great is it when I travel, I pop this thing open, and I'm always connected, no matter where I am, airport, hotel, home. I'm sitting right here in my office at the moment. It doesn't matter where I am. I'm always connected to our network in the exact same way. I don't have to worry about logging into Wi-Fi somewhere. I don't have to worry about connecting to VPN. I don't have to worry about any of that kind of stuff. I'm just always connected to the corporate network no matter where I am 24 hours a day. It's pretty cool, though. A lot of utility in that.

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Will Townsend: Yeah, it's powerful, especially for road warriors like you and I.

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Mike Fitz: Yeah, exactly.

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Will Townsend: Hey, Mike, it's been a great conversation, but as we wrap things up, I'd love to end with your recommendations to enterprises that are considering taking the leap to what T-Mobile for Business is doing with your advanced network solutions and this whole notion of a ubiquitous network. What sage advice would you provide CIOs?

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Mike Fitz: Yeah. Look, first of all, I know thinking about going to a very different technology like this can sometimes be a little intimidating. Is this novel approach come with risk? I would say, first of all, customers are ... This is not new. These technologies are not new. Maybe putting them together in the way I outlined that use case ...

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Will Townsend: That is new, yeah.

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Mike Fitz: ... that is new, but customers are doing that now. And I think the risk is very low. And I think ... I was thinking about this, risk is really about what are we conditioned to accept, I think, in many ways, right? I was talking to my wife about she was worried when we bought an EV, like, "Well, are those batteries ... Do we need to be concerned about those batteries?" And I thought, "Well, do we or are you concerned at all about the fact that when our kids are in the backseat of the car, their backend is sitting 12 inches from 20 gallons of flammable and explosive liquid?"

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Will Townsend: It's relative, right? Yeah.

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Mike Fitz: It's all relative. And she just said, "I never thought about that." And I was like, "That's because we're conditioned to accept that risk," but EVs are new and batteries are new. And I think it's a little bit like this, right? The idea of offloading and moving my traffic off of Wi-Fi and into a cellular world in the environment that I talked about is new and different. But arguably, we carriers probably know how to manage networks as well as anybody. I mean, we have 130 million devices connected to our network. We have tens of thousands of people that run a network.

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I would say we know how to run networks really well. And I think in the future, if this approach I outlined is the future, I think we're going to look back and say, "Wow, can you believe I was running my corporate network on the same technology I use in my house," which is Wi-Fi, with 10 guys that I hired or whatever it is. I mean these 10 guys that did this, and I love them to death, but now I'm glad that I've been able to move the network to a carrier grade network and put those 10 guys working on new agentic AI applications because that's making all the difference.

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Will Townsend: Exactly, exactly. Redeploying those resources to add more value to the line of business. And that's what I've seen T-Mobile for Business do over the years. Mike, I want to thank you and I want to thank our viewers for tuning in. This has been an Intelligent Edge Spotlight with T-Mobile for Business. Stay tuned for more insights coming up at the next Six Five Summit session. Thanks again, Mike, for your time. It's been a great conversation.

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Mike Fitz: Thank you. Great talking to you as well.

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