T-Mobile US took the wraps off of Edge Control and T-Platform for businesses which are in its advanced network solutions (ANS) portfolio and provisioned by the operator’s 5G-Advanced network.

The mobile operator’s Edge Control service routes data directly between endpoints, servers and compute resources.

Mo Katibeh, CMO for T-Mobile Business Group, told Mobile World Live Edge Control is an industry-first offering which combines its 5G-Advanced network with local breakouts to deliver private network-like performance without the complexity and cost of deployment at every location.

By staying within its 5G-Advanced network, Edge Control reduces the number of data hops by optimising routing between remote users and endpoints while ensuring fast, secure and compliant delivery.

Mobile edge compute (MEC) brings cloud compute resources and data processing closer to users and devices rather than relying on centralised data centres.

“Edge Control, on the other hand, is a network enabler for mobile edge compute,” Katibeh explained “It allows cellular data traffic to be locally broken out at a hospital or a manufacturing plant or a military base and flows directly into that enterprise’s MEC environment,” he explained.

While Verizon has long been a proponent of MEC through a partnership with Amazon Web Services, Katibeh said Edge Connect works with all hysperscalers and is hardware agnostic.

“The heart of this is delivering agnostic traffic and steering capabilities that deliver ultra-low latency, data sovereignty, and scalability, working with all hyperscaler and local edge deployment flavours,” he said.

Katibeh stated latency is in the 10 milliseconds to 20 milliseconds range, providing similar performance as traditional private networks “without the cost and the complexity of managing private infrastructure at every single site”.

He said the Edge Control local breakout capabilities have been in development “for a handful of quarters”.

Verticals using Edge Control include healthcare, manufacturing, remote employees, military defence or any other industry which needs to keep traffic secure and on premise.

“There’s significant value even for mid-sized health organisations, especially ones that need to protect their customers’ and patients’ information, and who may have remote users going out to check on patients that may not be able to come into the facility,” he stated. “They still want that local breakout capability.

“They still want to not traverse the public internet or utilise VPNs for their users that are out seeing patients.”

T-Platform
The operator’s internally developed T-Platform is a unified management portal for all T-Mobile for Business services and technologies, including Edge Control.

It centralises network management, monitoring and control from a single pane of glass, making it easier for businesses to oversee their entire connected ecosystem.

“We’ve already onboarded tens of thousands of our existing customers into T-Platform and have been getting really strong feedback,” Katibeh said. “This was the right moment to make it commercially available because it fits so well with Edge Control as another flavour of our product portfolio.”

Both Edge Control and T-Platform are available today (20 October) across the operator’s entire footprint.

T-Mobile for Business
While T-Mobile has been playing catch up with rivals Verizon and AT&T in the business sector, its 5G and nationwide 5G-Advanced networks are starting to pay dividends.

Earlier this year, the operator announced T-Priority for first responders and network slicing for businesses through its SuperMobile plan, and now Edge Control and T-Platform. All those services take advantage of its standalone 5G network first launched in 2020.

“We’re moving more and more customers over to the best mobile network because of these sorts of solutions that deliver and address customer pain points,” Katibeh stated.