To understand the power and potential of 5G wireless technology, it’s important to understand it as far more than an extension of 4G or LTE.

“5G was one of the first times that the technology groups got together to create a new way of thinking about how we run wireless networks,” said Chris Melus, the vice president of product management at T-Mobile for Business. The industry instead thought “in terms of massive amounts of internet-of-things devices near wireline broadband speeds, ultra-low latency – all of those things to really move away from what we traditionally think of as a slow wireless network.”

5G incorporates the fact that consumer, business, industrial and governmental users share the same network, yet have widely differing needs. 5G accommodates this in a couple of crucial ways, Melus said.

Advanced 5G Network Architecture

T-Mobile’s 5G Advanced Network Solutions is one way. It replaces campus-wide or factory-wide WiFi, a technology rapidly approaching its limits, Melus said. WiFi “can’t handle as many devices. There’s lots of interference that happens, and we all have experienced that.”

Cellular 5G delivers what he called wireline network capacity to facilities and installations “but without all the wires.” The organization can deploy sensors, battery operated devices, wireless routers and automated vehicles in essentially unlimited numbers.

“It’s a really broadening technology that’s going to open up a lot of capabilities for people and agencies that didn’t exist before,” Melus said.

Agencies can configure T-Mobile’s 5G product as a virtual private network (VPN) within a defined area or nationwide, available only to designed devices.

“Some customers also go in the other way,” Melus said. “They want a little bit for their own private usage, but they also want to have visitors coming in.” For example, a warehousing or logistics operation might want its local 5G “bubble” available to suppliers and shippers. Or the agency might want to let maintenance contractors use its 5G network.

“When people are building out a cellular network today,” Melus said, “they’re really having to think, what you want to accomplish with your organization, and also, how do you work and interact with people?”

To accommodate various use cases, Melus said, T-Mobile built its network in what it calls a layer cake.

“We have some assets in our spectrum portfolio that go really far to give broad coverage,” he said. “Then we move up in the spectrum frequencies to ones that don’t go as far, but they have a lot more capacity.” The top layer consists of millimeter wave spectrum, “which is doesn’t go very far, but has tremendous throughput capabilities.”

T-Priority and 5G Slicing

The fundamental 5G capability that accommodates these services and a high degree of flexibility is known as network slicing.

“It’s an amazing technology that only 5G can offer,” Melus said. It lets users create VPNs within the physical network. This in turn enables high-priority traffic to have its own network, in effect.

“Previously, if you wanted to have a different experience than everybody else, you had to go a very expensive route,” Melus said. “You had to go build your own private network. You had to ask for it to be configured a certain way to meet the business needs.”

Instead, “slicing allows us, in our normal commercial network, to create VPNs that meet the exact needs of the customers,” Melus said. For instance, an agency might need a low-latency slice dedicated to sensor updates. Two T-Mobile products, T-SIMsecure and T-Mobile Security Slice, form a secure access service edge (SASE) capability to help gather and route cybersecurity threat data in a high-priority manner.

The user can configure slices to operate dynamically, allocating users and expanding or contracting as priority traffic dictates, Melus said.

5G was designed to incorporate security, all the way down to the sources of integrated circuits used in 5G infrastructure gear. Moreover, Melus said, “almost everything in a 5g network is fully encrypted. It’s pretty impressive when you think about the computing power that’s needed to compute the encryption keys – and do all that as fast as the way our phones are working.” These advanced security and computing capabilities are made possible by a 5G standalone core and available through T-Priority – the world’s first network slice dedicated to first responders, critical infrastructure organizations and the Department of Defense.

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