Unlocking 5G Potential with Evan Kirstel & Chris Melus | T-Mobile for Business

hey everybody Evan kurstel here with another great discussion today Chris mellis of T-Mobile Chris how are you I'm great Evan thanks so much for having me here it's great to see you again yeah it's great to see you and I'm really excited for this conversation you are an engineer and a problem solver at heart um tell us about your journey uh through the world of 5G at T-Mobile for business sure um I've been in the Telecommunications industry for over 20 years working in all sorts of different aspects of the business from our operations teams all the way through development engineering and now responsible for the product development team here at T-Mobile for business and we've found that we're working on some really effective Solutions in this space with the right people working together which is really for us a really big thing that we like to do we have a diverse group of stakeholders we try to engage in a diverse group of people inside of T-Mobile working on these things we've also found that adopting the rate processes taking account the needs of meaningful change but also how do people Embrace that change 5G is a big change going on in the industry right now and people are really trying to understand and learn about it see how it fits their needs and how it's different than the things they might have today and then finally we have to have the right technology for the challenge and 5G is an amazing foundational solution that we're going to be able to build lots of future opportunities on and create new value for our customers and so many other people in the world as they communicate and how they go about their days and lives fantastic and of course 5G as a technology is intriguing to us as as Tech Geeks uh Engineers but you're also learning a lot about monetization of 5G tell us more yes we're I mean really 5G has had a lot of press right now about how it's coming but there haven't been a ton of people going out there and saying they're monetizing things here at T-Mobile for business we're finding a lot of success though and things with all kinds of connectivity across different manufacturing Partners Automotive Industries drones uh medical and health care as well as in the education world but giving connectivity that's dependable fast load latency and can really go above and beyond what people have experienced today is opening up a ton of new opportunities for us to not just make ourselves happy with our customers and them happy with what we're doing but also for them to be able to monetize things that in the past they might not been able to do capabilities that they may not have been able to achieve just because of the infrastructure and the technologies that they had were not able to deliver the performance and the response the liability that they need to service their customers and in their own operations and their technologies that they're trying to achieve absolutely and tell us about uh what you've learned through this journey to 5G it's been a long road uh from you know 1G 2G I actually started in paging so maybe that's zero g I'm not sure yeah but uh tell us about that journey and what's different what's unique why is 5G maybe just not another G yeah I mean a lot of folks say 5G what is it it must just be faster and of course it is but it's the first Wireless technology that has truly been built for one and two things one for the cloud with the cloud in mind and moving things around and getting into a virtualized world 5G is perfect for that kind of environment not only is it built from an architecture perspective and a security perspective and all of those things from the technology stuff that we like to talk about but from what a customer's perspective it is it now gives you that instantaneous access to data wherever it is at speeds and latencies that are really incredible the other great thing about 5G is it was built to be monetized it's not just built to be a Communications path it's built to be exposed to have networks as a service to really let customers engage with the network technology in ways that they've never been able to do so before and customize the experience that we build at a very macro level but to really make it specific to their needs and how their use cases are evolving from today to tomorrow and even into the future without having to worry about technology shifts like they have in the past it's a really exciting time to be moving ahead in this space because because it's really creating a lot of innovation especially in our partners and collaborators that we work with giving them capabilities to do things with their applications and services and things they're providing that they've never had access to before with any sort of other Wireless technology yeah certainly the most exciting time in my career speaking of careers your career how did you join T-Mobile for business what was that Journey like um I've spent the vast majority of my career actually in the technology side and the CTO offices um starting my way all the way at the beginning as a just a project manager in operations and working my way eventually through up into the development and leading a lot of our applications and development teams at Sprint so I came into T-Mobile as part of the integration of those two great companies and then spent the vast majority of the first few years working on integrating those two groups after that I saw a great opportunity to come here and T-Mobile for business which was really on the precipice of blowing out its product portfolio into very technologically advanced capabilities like we're doing in 5G with our 5G Advanced Network Solutions the things we're doing in our Enterprise collaboration tools as well as our fixed Wireless capabilities so it was just an opportunity I couldn't pass up to come over here and Lead this great group of people that are working on some really fantastic products and Technologies to bring to our customers wonderful wow your enthusiasm is really infectious and let's talk about the 5G ecosystem the whole landscape I mean what is developing and bringing 5G powered solutions to market look like what works in terms of the Partnerships the collaborations and and Beyond yes we think about really our our Partnerships in three big ways um one of course we have our incubation uh capabilities that we have with our 5G open Innovation lab you see us doing a lot of interesting cool things that we've done in that space things like Pano looking for fire detection automatically on the tops of towers things that we're doing with Halo and self-driving cars some of the work that you've even seen in this week being a great time to talk about what we've done with major league baseball and a couple of proof of Concepts and those areas to really show what 5G can Empower in terms of broadcast Technologies the second big area we think about is obviously our commercial Partnerships um we bring a lot of great things to the table from a technology standpoint but we can't do everything we can't be experts in everything and just like our query commercial Partners they can't be great at everything too so we found getting together with some of those teams and other Partnerships makes it really advantageous for us to bring things to our last part of who we think about our customers Partnerships which is our customers very often we get into conversations with customers and we don't do just a one-size-fits all here's the product we have take it off the shelf and go buy it we really think about how do we innovate give customers just bright solution but work with them to evolve their applications their services their devices to work with our capabilities and come up with new and innovative ideas we've done several of these recently with yet to be announced but coming soon a major deal in the medical field with a very large-scale hospital where they had applications that they used that we weren't familiar with in that space and they're not experts so we not only partnered with the customer we also partnered with another collaborator in the space who had expertise there to bring together three great companies three great use cases and bring that together to form something that's really going to be quite quite impressive once it's up and ready and running so we're really excited about those kind of capabilities that we're building across our collaborators our Innovation capabilities and of course our commercial Partnerships that we have well spectacular and one of the main ingredients of a you know effective partnership what is a you know collaboration look like in the 5G era yeah a lot of it depends on what we're doing and one of it is about scale how do you bring solutions to scale and not make them one-off so when we look for partners we look for partners that are being Innovative collaborating with us trying to figure out a solution that works for that specific capability and use case but also we can scale it much more broadly so these would be things like in the capabilities of say computer vision they have very specific models they need to be run but if you integrate with the right partner in that space you can now begin to bring that to more and more customers at a much more rapid Pace than you used to in the password everything was custom built and another area that we look at is just are you ready to be Wireless so many technologies have been built on Old Wireline Technologies and now that we've freed people from wires and we've untethered their Innovation we really need to start to have people think differently and us as a wireless first customer company we have our DNA and Mobility our DNA and wireless so we bring that together with a great marriage with our collaborations our Partnerships our incubators and all of those things to kind of really move things into the future so those are some really important things that we look through when we go through our Partnerships on how we bring things to Market fantastic so as you know 5G trials are proof of concepts are plentiful but product launches are harder to come by you know what does it take to really accelerate those Innovative Partnerships into real tangible results and Roi for all parties absolutely and that that's a great question and you hit it actually at the end of it with Roi we really stop trying to talk about technology I mean we do talk about technology we're very proud of what our engineering and network teams and our it teams have built however most customers don't understand that technology you and I could sit here all day and probably have some really great conversations about about the tech but when we brought to customers what we're talking about solving their business problems solving their use cases and really demonstrating what the rli is going to be in that in that in the solution that we're building for them and that's really the key focus and we found once we've shifted that discussion away from the tech away from just showing maps of coverage and speed but really saying this is what T-Mobile's 5G can do to solve your business problems here's how it's going to give you back Investments over the next couple of years or months depending on what we're building it really opens up a key to that delivery and that was been key for us in some of the things we've closed with companies like cell GP what we've done recently with a major university which we'll be announcing soon some of the things we've been doing in the medical field and also some work that we've done in the federal government it's really all about showing of this investment is future proofed it's going to grow with you that's going to give you capabilities and unlock things that you've never thought possible and it's up to us and T-Mobile as their partner to show them and demonstrate what the ROI and that's going to be and that's really been the key to us to making some of the big wins that we've been having recently fantastic so you guys know a thing or two about scale but how do you scale these Innovative 5G Solutions you know get them to Market globally nationally you know Etc well one reason we're talking about today is a lot of strong Partnerships and collaboration uh really finding people who are well diversed in some of these things for example doing installations of some of our equipment and services in a medical environment is very very different than doing some of the things we do say in our broadcast space are working with some of our Sports Partnerships so finding those Partners who can go and know that space understand all the rules the regulations and how to put those things in is super important on top of that it's finding Partners in the application space we're working with who also understand things like the regulatory environment all the rules and regulations certain industries have the work we do and finance for example and some of our collaboration capabilities is very specific to that work in those use cases as you can imagine making sure that you know trading and all of those things are covered and capable and have the right sets of security as well as documentation so finding again those Partners is really key to scaling because for us to learn all those individual things would be impossible and we would never be able to go and scale and move at full speed so finding Partners in those spaces who are well entrenched who understand the space and who can move as quickly as we like to move those are the keys for us and how we we make scale out of our deployments and we have some Specialties as well in T-Mobile for business but we have those go work with really strong partners and collaborators out in in the commercial world and the public sector to help us really accelerate our and scale our deployments and our wins interesting so you must have quite a playbook for best practices for go to market with these Partners I I see lots of announcements on a weekly basis folks like AWS uh you know Google and Beyond you know what are some of those best practices uh in collaborating with uh partners one of the first things we've learned is we really need to be flexible and open as we enter into the work that we start to do with someone for example working with the city of Bellevue and one of the recent announcements you've probably seen on some of the automotive and Public Safety work we're doing to keep pedestrians and vulnerable Road unions safe in the trial in Bellevue we couldn't go in with our normal set of big contracts and all of the stuff that we need to do because we actually didn't know exactly what we're going to solve so one of the things we learned is to go in and be as lightweight as possible and really the number one thing is to keep our ears open listen to what the customers need what are they trying to accomplish and then not come in and be prescriptive about well here's our Playbook and we're going to run all of these steps we try to understand well this is going to work for you and this is not going to work for you and this we can do a little bit faster and this we're going to have to take a little bit more time to understand so as we grow and do more and different types of installations and different types of solutioning and different types of customers we get to build all these little bits of ingredients as I like to call them in our kitchen so we start to become much faster being able to go do things and every time we go and do a completion of one of these activities roll out a product with a customer in a new space or a new vertical we learn they learn our partners learn and we're able to transfer that into the next opportunity that we have so that's really where we've been trying to be focused is not the prescriptiveness it's a new era for everybody we understand it really really well but we really have to try and help people again understand that Roi really try to stay what we're trying to accomplish and then be very flexible in our Solutions and our approaches to doing our deployments and then also to our commercial agreements so it's been a little bit of a fun ride recently but as you've seen we have a lot of announcements coming and a whole bunch more coming here through the rest of this year well fantastic um so your work isn't without challenges and obstacles uh you know what are some of the misunderstandings that you see out there around 5G in the go to market particularly from a business or B2B perspective right that's a great question and that's when we travel we have had to tackle many many times luckily work we're doing and putting out great work and understanding and making sure people know it things like helping from you and other folks in the tech world who actually can understand this as well is really trying to explain hey this isn't just faster we talked about that a little bit earlier but hey why don't I just go and get my Wi-Fi upgraded why don't I just move to Wi-Fi six um what about things in cbrs or hey why would I need any of those things maybe I can just stick with wires so moving beyond that it's just not about speed is one of the big key discussions that we have with a customer right up front we really talk about once you can untether yourself and you can't think about the way Wi-Fi Wi-Fi is great and we use it we are not allergic to using Wi-Fi so I'm going to place for that but to give the top quality of performance and latency and really the guarantees of understanding that that service is going to work all the time we've all had the experiences in airports or hotels or other places where maybe we don't have great access to cellular service and I'm sure you've had this experience at some of the trade shows we we all attend and you can't get on the Wi-Fi it's just too crowded it's just not built for a massive scale it's not built for things like massive iot so making those conversations in the beginning with the customers to really get them to understand but a translating to get into an Roi how many radios do you have to put in for Wi-Fi to cover this area versus how many radios do we have to put in when we're using our license Spectrum on 5G these are the things that start to get people and you see the light bulbs go on in their head the other challenge though has still been the ecosystem we work with a lot of we didn't really talk about this but a lot of some of our other Partnerships are ecosystem Partners people who are building Hardware phones routers mobile hotspots cameras iot devices we're finally setting into the world where those capabilities of 5G are making their way into these devices and that has been a little bit of an impediment in the last few years across the industry about T-Mobile issue but we spend a lot of time at energy working specifically with those Partners to say look we've uncovered these use cases for this type of device that you make let's work together we've identified lots of opportunities but what's holding us back is it's not 5G capable so putting those things together is really those two areas of Education around what 5G is and what it's not how is it better than some of the other technologies that you may have at Price Tag I'm saying oh they're not so you know it's not so bad in a per unit price but when you look at the overall installation costs the overall operating cost but then really the performance you're going to get out of that system versus what you'll get with a 5G implementation then you get the customer over that hump and we start to move into now we have the devices now we have the applications now we have the partner ecosystem our collaborators our innovators and we're bringing it all together and we're really I think at a critical point now where we're beginning to see a lot of traction where most of those things are not concerns anymore for our customer bases but they have been for a little bit of time fantastic let's take a step back a minute look at the macro business and Tech landscape what do you see as some of the biggest uh opportunities for 5G in business today um for sure manufacturing um and Logistics I mean those Healthcare as well but manufacturing and Logistics are areas of 24 7 operation vast Mobility moving things around this you know the entire country if not the world and if you look at the relationships we have in our tiot product which gives you Global reach on that these are things that are so amazing for manufacturers to say I can track apart as it starts its journey in my manufacturing line all the way through assembly as it goes down and through shipping and Logistics and then ultimately if we do this correctly you can have a b to B to C capability when you deliver that to the customer and that's a great example of what's going on in the automotive industry for instance Trucking and transportation Logistics industry just that amount of collecting of data to not just be able to do what you're doing in your supply chain and your capabilities but what you can also deliver to the End customer and capabilities is really something that's amazing and the healthcare industry again the amount of data that goes in healthcare is staggering entering and most people probably don't have any understanding of that the amount of things going on in imaging and just talking to people video it's huge amounts of data that is really stressing the currents at communication systems that most hospitals and other Healthcare Providers are experiencing so that's another area that we think is going to be really really large for the 5G area but there's really almost no place that 5G is not going to touch as AI becomes more and more uh prolific in in the things that we do which I think we can all agree we're we're really right there now at the beginning of that Journey it's hard to read anything these days without someone having AI or introducing Ai and we're just at the beginning of that Journey there's a large amounts of data's in those models and today Engineers are amazingly smart they work around the limitations of their connectivity they move a lot of things on device they move a lot of things those large language models are massive but the more and more you get fast low latency connectivity with 5G you can move more of those things up back into the cloud and cheaper devices on the endpoint faster models being built and run so that way you can learn from things going on say in one Factory to impact one of your other factories in a much faster fashion so those things are going to be driving them and the access to that data the data Lakes are growing and growing and growing but we've so seen so much research that shows all of that iot data all of that stuff gets stored very rarely gets used because it's so hard to access so for 5G is going to really enable that and then lastly I think an area that we're seeing a lot of promises what it's going to go do to some of the other areas like broadcasting and sports um already we're doing things with some major sports franchises and some major sports leads on how we're transforming their business removing their tethering in their cabling and having them and then being able to do really amazing things you've seen some of the stuff we've done with drone Racing link for instance where putting 5G into that space just amazingly from a broadcast perspective on what they can show their customers and their consumers and Their audience is just fantastic so there's really not going to be any area we don't think 5G is going to touch but those are definitely some of the upfront ones that are really ready to embrace the technology and have use cases that can really be pushed forward in the order of magnitude of where they are by using 5G versus traditional connectivity wow I need to take a breath here this is so exciting uh so inspiring and thank you so much for sharing all the insight and your vision at T-Mobile for business um and uh look forward to additional discussions in the near future the space is changing so rapidly we need updates from you soon and before we sign off here I noticed this I've been looking at this basketball in the background here I'm a basketball fanatic myself what is that and uh yeah I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to uh to meet and speak with uh Christian Laettner uh the great basketball star from duke long NBA career the only Collegiate player on the original Dream Team um and uh have a little bit of time to spend with him and he was gracious enough to to sign a basketball for me which I hear in my office you guys meet the best people so I can't wait to catch a game together and thanks everyone thanks for watching thanks for tweeting and posting any comments replies Shares are welcome and until next time take care thank you thank you

2023-08-06 07:12

Other news