Unpacking the Potential of the Connected Intelligent Edge

Will Townsend:
Welcome to The Six Five Summit. This year’s theme is AI Unleashed. This is the Connected Intelligent Edge track. And I have the pleasure of speaking with Mike Fitz with T-Mobile. He leads solutions sales for T-Mobile for Business.

But before we get started, I want to set 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 SASE for secure, ubiquitous access. And so with that, Mike, 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.

Mike Fitz:
Yeah. Yeah. Great. Well, first of all, great to be here. Great to have this time together again. I always enjoy doing these with you.

Will Townsend:
Yea, me too.

Mike Fitz:
Yeah, let’s start with what does that really mean. And I will tell you, I work for a connectivity company here at T-Mobile, so I’m a little biased on the word “connected” in the-

Will Townsend:
You sure are.

Mike Fitz:
… Connected Intelligent Edge, but to me, really what it means is simply this; when you think about connectivity and how important it is to underpin applications, to me, what Connected Intelligent Edge is, it’s almost the other way of saying 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 GCP have done in the compute space and do the same thing in the connectivity space; create that ultra flexibility, reliability, stability, security for connectivity to underpin and support applications in the same way those guys do?

So to me, that’s really what that Connected Intelligent Edge is all about.

Will Townsend:
No, it makes perfect sense, Mike. I think one of the challenges, CIOs are faced with just a number of challenges with disaggregated infrastructure, with AI, with protecting AI, and all of that. And from your perspective and speaking with your customers, where does this whole notion of Connected Intelligent Edge fall within the priority rankings of all these other things that they’re dealing with?

Mike Fitz:
Well, it’s certainly important to them. But 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 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, productive application that really 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 should never forget that when we’re in this business because I will tell you, I have not yet walked into an EBC or a customer meeting where a customer says to me, “Hey, if I can just buy more 5G sims today, it’ll be a great day.”

Will Townsend:
Right.

Mike Fitz:
That doesn’t happen. They walk in and they want to solve their problems, right? They want to create value for their company. And we can be a means to help them do that.

Will Townsend:
Yeah. And I love the fact that you pointed to business outcome. This isn’t about collecting technology. It’s about driving better business outcomes and really enhancing the overall customer experience. And I followed 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 business as well.

When you talk about the network edge, lots of people define it differently. I’ve heard fat, thin, near, far. And I’m wondering, from your perspective, how far does T-Mobile’s edge extend?

Mike Fitz:
Well, the way I think about the definition of the edge is 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, 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… I’ve been in this business, like you, a long time. And the old days where we used to define a box of, “Hey, here’s your MPLS core and your apps are going to run in there,” those days are gone. Our users now demand, “I want to work mobily. I want to work at home.”

And I think, frankly, the connected edge is wherever they take us, and we have to embrace it. Of course, we can control that to a degree, and we know that. But if you want to create the value and really satisfy those end users, that connected edge has to extend 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 need to figure out how we meet them there and provide what I said earlier, that resiliency, stability, security, etc., in that connectivity wherever they are.

Will Townsend:
Yeah. It’s meeting customers where they are. Right?

Mike Fitz:
Yeah.

Will Townsend:
And I know that the company… You’ve spoken a lot around the flexibility that 5G provides and the ability to support work from anywhere. And certainly, we live in a hybrid work world now where I think telecommuting before the pandemic was a nice-to-have, and now it’s table stakes. Right?

Mike Fitz:
Yeah. Yeah.

Will Townsend:
And it’s important to be able to meet customers where they’re at. Specifically, can you speak to what T-Mobile is doing to embrace that idea of meeting users where they work? Is everything that you’re doing, from the way that you’re architecting the network deployment or the way that you’re delivering applications or security, that support, because security is a huge issue too, right?

Mike Fitz:
Yeah. No, it is. It’s key to that. No, for sure. Well, I tell you, we’ve embraced this idea that I actually think is fairly unique and actually a little bit disruptive in the way we’ve been doing networks our whole careers, and it’s this idea that… I’ve been calling it the flat network. And the concept is that we can, for the first time, I think ever, frankly, connect our users of our applications, no matter what persona they may be, to the same network all the time.

And you may say, “Well, wait a minute. Have we been doing that? And what does that mean?” Well, I would say no, we haven’t been doing that. In fact, we connect to different networks all the time. I know you’re traveling right now, and I think you might even be in a hotel, I’m not sure.

Will Townsend:
I am. I am.

Mike Fitz:
You probably are, given your schedule. But think about your travels in the last… since you left home to go out there on that trip. How many different networks have you been connected to?

Will Townsend:
Right.

Mike Fitz:
You were on your home network, you were in an Uber maybe on your mobile network, you were in an airport, you were on an airplane maybe. That’s four. The hotel is five. The convention, that’s six. If you go see another customer right after, that’s seven. Lots of different networks. And every one of those networks has different performance characteristics, different reliability characteristics, different security profiles. It’s very unpredictable.

And what we are unlocking here, and I think it’s pretty exciting, is this idea that, with 5G cellular, really cellular but 5G in particular, and I’ll talk about how private networks play into this in a minute, all three of the personas (as I described them) of a user… And when I say personas, I’m not talking about a technology persona, but how they think about consuming work and consuming applications.

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.

For the first time ever, we can provide a single network that can connect them in all three personas 24/7. We do that… At T-Mobile, we’re really good at doing that mobily. That’s what people know us for, right?

Will Townsend:
Yeah.

Mike Fitz:
We’ve also been crushing the home and business internet space with our fixed wireless products. We’ve been doing about half a million devices a quarter in an industry that’s doing about 800,000. And I’m not talking fixed wireless, I’m talking overall internet connections. Right? Crushing that space. So we’ve built a strong foothold there.

And now with our private 5G options, which we can talk about in a minute, we’ve now covered the workspace as well. So again, 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, traffic filtering, consumption models, 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, 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 going to be on over the next week? And how could I build my application to the least common denominator to perform? 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 unlocked something pretty exciting and a first in the industry by disrupting this whole WAN, LAN, Wi-Fi model that’s been around forever. And we find it pretty exciting actually.

Will Townsend:
It is. And you’re optimizing for the best user experience again, right?

Mike Fitz:
Yeah.

Will Townsend:
You’re not having to, to your point, focus on the least common denominator. 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 securities.

And so think about that scenario that we were just walking through. 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 unilaterally, and then game over. So you’re only as strong as your weakest link, right?

Mike Fitz:
Absolutely. Yeah.

Will Townsend:
That’s what I find super powerful.

Mike Fitz:
No, and that’s exactly what I meant by you build applications and you build connectivity to the least common denominator. In your example, that hotel Wi-Fi could very well be it. So, no, you’re absolutely right.

Will Townsend:
Yeah. You mentioned private a couple of times. It’s super exciting. Traditionally, cellular has been used as a redundant backup in enterprise deployments and that sort of thing. It’s becoming the primary modality, especially in operational technology environments, areas that have been traditionally unconnected.

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, 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 license spectrum and how you manage all that.

And so I’d love for you to spend some time on T-Mobile’s approach and how you’re trying to simplify that whole process for your customers.

Mike Fitz:
Well, it’s a great question, and I can’t tell you that we or anybody yet has greatly solved this or simplified it such that there’s one answer because there is honestly no single answer just yet. But I can certainly answer from the perspective of how I think most customers are looking at it today.

And I will tell you, one of the reasons why private networks and the whole idea is so exciting to us is it is sort of that anchor that unlocks this whole flat network architecture. Because up until now, the the domain of the workplace has been dominated by legacy WANs and Wi-Fi networks and LANs in those buildings. Right?

And so when you start to put 5G in those buildings, cellular in there, that becomes the primary means of connectivity 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. 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 I think there was a period of time we went through, thinking private 5G meant air-gapped, separate networks. We got to put our secure and mission-critical stuff over here. And honestly, that is a use case, but a real niche use case we’re finding.

The biggest use case we’re finding is we have embraced the idea that really what we’re doing for our customers is purpose-building 5G. That is really 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, which you often have in a Wi-Fi network.

I mean, yeah, you can certainly build out and densify your Wi-Fi access points and do a much better job, but it’s not easy. It’s not easy to get every nook and cranny.

Will Townsend:
It might also not be cost-efficient as well, right?

Mike Fitz:
It may not be. And you may not have a practical way to light up the outdoors area of a campus, right?

Will Townsend:
Yeah.

Mike Fitz:
And so 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. For example, one of the universities we lit up actually had really good T-Mobile coverage, 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 or incoming freshman an iPad as a benefit of going to that university, they said, “Hey, if this is really going to work, we need every nook and cranny of this place covered, the basement to the library, the last dorm 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. It was just purpose-built coverage providing an enhanced experience, but it created so much value for that university that they were willing to let us monetize that because they knew it was something we wouldn’t have needed to really build otherwise if it weren’t to solve this specific problem for them.

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 Wi-Fi and let it perform. And we’ve talked about a couple of those examples here, augmenting…

The example I often use with customers that sometimes resonates when I talk about Wi-Fi is, I think of coverage at a campus or any location, think about a gallon jug. And when you fill that gallon jug up with golf balls, think of those golf balls as Wi-Fi coverage, a sphere of Wi-Fi coverage. And of course, what’s the the space between the balls? That’s where you don’t have coverage. Right?

Will Townsend:
Right. Yeah.

Mike Fitz:
And then what 5G does for you, think of the 5G coverage as a basketball that just envelops the whole jug. And that’s the analogy that’s resonated with a lot of our customers. And we sometimes do see a 10 or 15 to 20:1 radio ratio that does provide indeed that better coverage.

Will Townsend:
I like that analogy. I’m a baseball fan. Maybe next time we can talk about how many baseballs-

Mike Fitz:
All right. Very good.

Will Townsend:
… can go in there.

Mike Fitz:
It’s probably actually a better analogy because you’d probably get closer to the 10 or 15:1 than golf would. But yes, yes, we’ll do that next.

Will Townsend:
Right. Right.

Mike Fitz:
Yeah. Yeah.

Will Townsend:
Mike, as we wind things up, I know… So we spent some time talking about the flat network concept. And I think you did an excellent job of describing the different connections that have to be made there. But from your perspective, can you describe how customers can improve the user experience?

I mean, can you point to a specific example? It may be consumers, but it may be consumers or customers of your business clients within the T-Mobile for Business company.

Mike Fitz:
Yeah. We have a lot of 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 mobily and working at a work location; in this case, let’s take a hospital.

So we have a customer of ours up in Boston who asked us to build out their hospital with a private 5G system. Again, they were that epitome of a customer who needed ultra reliability. If you’re going to run an Epic application there and you’re going to push alerts and so forth, you cannot miss messages, you cannot miss calls, etc.

So the business case, the cost-benefit proved out all day long to build a private 5G network for that. But the example here that I think it unlocks as we start to lean into SASE and ultimately network slicing, and we think about what it means to now have that coverage in the hospital and at home and mobily 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 going to connect them with a higher priority, we’re going to give them minimum speeds, we’re going to give them better latency, and we’re going to 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?

Will Townsend:
Sure. Yeah.

Mike Fitz:
Now, that same nurse leaves, is off work, goes out to dinner, meet his or her spouse. They’ve now fallen back to being a consumer again essentially with that device. So now because we know they’re not on the clock, they’re not at the location anymore, 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.

And now let’s take the third scenario where that nurse goes home. While they’re still on their consumer mode, so we continue to treat them like a consumer, but imagine a world where we have built integration with APIs, which we are building, and the APIs hook into that hospital system’s (let’s say Workday) scheduling system.

And we know, at midnight, that nurse is actually on call. And because we cannot have that nurse miss anything, at midnight, we elevate the status of that connection to, again, provide a higher quality, 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.

Will Townsend:
Yeah.

Mike Fitz:
Right? That example I just gave can only come to life when that device is connected to the same network, 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 mobile at dinner, and when they were at home; both at home as a consumer and a mom and a dad or as a nurse on call.

To me, that is incredibly powerful and exciting and really unlocks this vision that I described of this flat network architecture.

Will Townsend:
Yeah. And it totally drives home the whole notion of intelligence and connectivity-

Mike Fitz:
Yes, exactly.

Will Townsend:
… at the edge of the network as well. Mike, that was stupendous. Well done, my friend.

Mike Fitz:
Thank you.

Will Townsend:
With that, I’ve got a final question for you as we close, and I think this is 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?

Mike Fitz:
Yeah. Look, I will tell you, it probably starts with understanding what are you trying to do with it. 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 a number of customers that come in and say, “Hey, we heard about this private 5G thing. Tell me about it.” And we talked about it. But there’s not a use case, there’s not a problem we’re trying to solve, and it doesn’t go anywhere. So, no, we got to know our use cases, first and foremost.

And then the flip-side of any cost-benefit analysis is what is your TCO on your current networks? We’ve run into that too where customers say, “Hey, I really like this, but I don’t know if I can justify the network spend to upgrade from Wi-Fi to 5G.” And we go round and round because look, we’ve done this enough times now that we know the costs involved. And I’ll tell you, I’ve had a number of customers come back to me and say, “Well, here’s my cost for running Wi-Fi.” And I look at it and then they’ve missed half the costs that they’re incurring that when I point it out, they’re like, “Oh, yeah. You’re right. I forgot about that. Oh, yeah, I forgot about that.”

Will Townsend:
Right.

Mike Fitz:
We’ve taken it for granted, I think, sometimes, what our costs are. So understanding that that TCO is so important as well.

Will Townsend:
Yeah.

Mike Fitz:
And then just doing our homework. Because 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?

Will Townsend:
Right.

Mike Fitz:
It could 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 going to offer you some benefits maybe that sometimes that CBRS can’t. And what’s the difference between an air-gapped private network or a pure macro network extension like we did for the hospital, or a hybrid that’s somewhat in-between?

And so it’s really just educating. And certainly, at T-Mobile, we do that a lot. We’re happy to do that and would love to support that. And I will tell you, Wi-Fi plays a big role still. It’s not going away anytime soon. For future implementations, we keep Wi-Fi, and we’ll use it for guest Wi-Fi, guest access, or even a failover sometimes. Right? Why not? It’s there. It still works. We use it.

My advice would be, just get educated, reach out to companies like us, T-Mobile and others, and learn how you can apply this to propel your business as well.

Will Townsend:
Yeah, it’s great, Mike. I love how T-Mobile for Business is meeting customers where they’re at. To your point, one size doesn’t often fit all. And workload, application set, campus branch, remote work environment drives a lot of this. So, really, really sage advice. I always enjoy our conversations, and I hope we continue this-

Mike Fitz:
Same here.

Will Townsend:
… into the future. But again, thanks for your time. And I want to thank our viewers for tuning in as well to this Connected Intelligent Edge Session. Check out all of the sessions that are going on, not only within the Connected Intelligent Edge, but we’ve got cybersecurity, we’ve got automation, we’ve got a whole host more. So with that, Mike, thanks again.

Mike Fitz:
Thank you, Will.

Will Townsend:
And to our viewers, have a great time.