T-Mobile has unveiled a solution promising 5G-Advanced and network slicing capabilities for US enterprises.

Dubbed SuperMobile, the offering integrates network slicing, satellite-to-mobile coverage, and T-Mobile’s in-built security provision.

The suite builds upon T-Mobile’s 5G Advanced, the telecom giant’s 5G Standalone (5G SA) architecture unveiled in April of this year. The framework is based on 5G-Advanced, which has been deemed critical for operators to support network slicing services.

In its pitch to businesses, the telecom giant touted SuperMobile’s network slice as optimizing the connectivity needed for business use cases such as large file transfers and video conferencing.

Beyond slices, the SuperMobile package bundles T-Mobile’s existing smartphone-based security provision alongside its direct-to-device (D2D) offering, T-Satellite.

That service was launched in July of this year, allowing users to connect their smartphone automatically to a constellation of more than 650 Low Earth Orbit (LEO) Starlink satellites, building on the partnership between T-Mobile and Elon Musk's SpaceX.

Network slicing and dicing

Viewed as one of the key architectural features of a 5G SA deployment, network slicing allows an operator to set up siloed virtual networks that act as independent, scalable networks, able to handle the extra traffic from resource-heavy examples such as video streaming.

The network solution is central to both T-Mobile and Ericsson banking on the potential of wireless 5G over legacy 4G and LTE cores from rivals. ABI Research has forecast network slicing to become a $19.5 billion market by 2028 - but current technical and use case issues have slowed down the market in recent years, with 2018 seeing ABI originally proclaim it as a $66bn market opportunity by 2026.

With SuperMobile, T-Mobile is making a pitch for network slices beyond more niche markets such as cloud gaming, extended reality (XR), and autonomous vehicles.

Those fields were touted by the operator when it launched Low Latency, Low Loss, Scalable Throughput (L4S) as part of its US-wide rollout of 5G Advanced this summer.

L4S's more targeted congestion control technology can complement network slicing’s traffic handling, with both features highlighting 5G-Advanced as a differentiator in telecoms.

The tech also offers advantages in AI-driven services such as artificial intelligence radio access network (AI-RAN).