T-Mobile US is enjoying the fruits of being an early mover with the deployment of its standalone (SA) 5G network four years ago, which has provided a boost for its enterprise sector through services such as network slicing.

While the operator doesn’t break out revenue for its business services and applications, Mishka Dehghan, SVP, strategy, product and solutions engineering at T-Mobile Business Group, told Mobile World Live it has seen a “a significant growth trajectory over the last two years” while delivering “on every single metric of growth that we have set for ourselves”.

“A year ago, a year and a half ago, we were all wondering if the hype of 5G would materialise,” she said. “Over the last 18 months, the number of deployments that have happened is just the tip of the iceberg.”

Dehghan noted the operator is deploying network slicing across several commercial use cases, with the most recent being last month’s announcement of T-Priority, which is a network slice for public safety.

At last week’s MWC Las Vegas, Mo Katibeh, CMO of T-Mobile Business Group, explained network slicing gives the operator up to 40 per cent more capacity and more than two times the speed when compared to AT&T and Verizon’s first responder networks.

Using the operator’s entire 238MHz of spectrum, network slicing allows it to steer, prioritise and manage traffic based on first responders’ priorities at a given time.

“We are the only telecommunications provider in America who is willing to set a minimum standard for those first responders,” he said. “And then beyond that, it’s enabling us to take the entire network and dynamically expand it as needed to support first responders. Not building a separate small network for them but giving them access to the entire thing at that moment when they truly need it. It is a game changer.”

T-Mobile served up a network slice in November during the Las Vegas Grand Prix Formula One race to power more than 100 point-of-sale terminals for fans. Dehghan stated the network slice in Las Vegas was one of its largest to date and “really showed us what network slicing can do”.

Ulf Ewaldsson, president of technology at T-Mobile, stated at MWC Las Vegas that in addition to network slicing, the operator’s business service portfolio also includes 5G private networks.

“We see a growing business in private networks,” he said. “We can then provide these private networks with APIs so they can be programmable together with the surrounding macro networks and provide something that nobody else can do.”