LAS VEGAS – UScellular might lack the size of its three larger domestic wireless rivals – Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile US – but that’s not stopping the regional operator from using a proven playbook and its own network assets to grow its enterprise business. Those move come at a critical time for a wireless operator facing an uncertain future.

Kim Kerr, SVP of enterprise sales and operations for UScellular, told SDxCentral at this week’s MWC Las Vegas event that while the operator has been providing wireless service for more than 40 years – being “local when local wasn’t cool” – the operator only “dabbled in business.”

“We had a direct sales force for around seven years or so, but not really going in big,” Kerr said, adding “it was probably a line item on the PowerPoint.” This despite the company’s board telling the operator to lean more heavily into the lucrative enterprise space.

Enter Kerr, who has deep experience in using mobile technology to target the enterprise space. This includes past work at Nextel, which was a wireless enterprise juggernaut (chirp, chirp) before being acquired by Sprint, and Kerr later served in similar enterprise-focused management positions at Sprint through its acquisition by T-Mobile US.

Kerr noted that UScellular’s dabbling involved the usual use cases around different technology evolutions – 2G for text messaging and low-speed data, 3G for email and 4G for video – but 5G brought on a new challenge … and opportunity. “How do you monetize it?” she stated.

This provided Kerr with a clean slate in terms of starting from scratch to build a team and replicate what she had been successful doing in the past, but with a new operator and a new technology generation.

Kerr has since built a direct sales team, a dedicated marketing team, dedicated sales ops and enablement and a dedicated product team focused on enterprise needs. These teams are segmented to target different verticals, including small- and midsized businesses (SMBs), the public sector, education and utilities.

Those teams are tasked with providing different levels of support to those different verticals, tapping into new hires into UScellular and also long-time employees, some of whom were moved from different parts of the business to take advantage of unique skillsets.

“So we've set this up and we're starting to realize the monetization of having those types of teams and figuring out what is it that we can bring to bear while not boiling the ocean,” Kerr said.

Those efforts have resulted in a big service push by the carrier, including those highly touted by its larger rivals. The most prominent of which is the private 5G space.

UScellular earlier this month signed a deal with Betacom to launch what they claimed to be the first “private-public hybrid 5G network” option in the United States. The deal has UScellular tapping into its regional telecommunications infrastructure and market experience tied to Betacom’s managed private 5G platform. From UScellular, this means access to the carrier’s owned mobile network assets, its nationwide roaming agreements and data backhaul between sites.

This followed on a deal UScellular signed this summer with Ericsson to link that vendor’s Private 5G network portfolio with the carrier’s connectivity services. This is being targeted at so-called “Industry 4.0” verticals like manufacturing, logistics, distribution and warehouse use cases; and expanding into hospitals, industrial IoT, ports, utilities and airports.

And just this week, UScellular  signed a deal with IoT services provider Soracom to provide network connectivity. Soracom, which is owned by Japanese telecom giant KDDI, stated it will use this deal to offer IoT services in the United States.

Kerr is proud of those partnerships, which is a different path than some of those larger rivals.

“Verizon, rightly so, they’ve got a big team and they like to own it. They like to do it all top to bottom,” Kerr said. “We are in the camp of bringing the right partnerships. You've got to bring in strategic partnerships, figure out what you know, some kind of strategic alliances and revenue share, whatever that looks like, and then that's how you win because they've got that industry expertise and that's how you really win. We want clients to come to us because we've got the ecosystem, because it's very complex, and then we facilitate that solution working with our partner. That's how we move in.”

Kerr said the operator has private network deals with three utilities, is looking to do its first deployment with a manufacturing company and is getting involved with digital manufacturing and cybersecurity institute MxD in Chicago.

“We are not behind,” Kerr said of UScellular’s private network efforts. “We are right there with everyone else.”

While Kerr is driving the operator’s enterprise aspirations with clarity, UScellular’s future remains murky.

The carrier’s parent company Telephone and Data Systems (TDS) has stated plans for exploring “strategic alternatives” for its wireless operations.

Rumors had initially linked a possible deal with Dish Network, which itself is looking to expand into the private 5G business.

“They have towers, they have spectrum and they operate in geographies that we haven’t fully built out so it’d be something that we’d be interested in looking at,” Tom Cullen, EVP of corporate development at Dish Network, said during a recent Dish Network presentation.

Kerr noted her focus remains on what is directly in front, which is continuing to use UScellular’s resources to compete and innovate in the enterprise space.

“We move fast and we move with agility, and I love the fact that we had agility and none of the political mountains that I had to move out of the way. It was literally ‘how do we help you, Kim? What do we need to do?’ We were able to accelerate. What we did in two years was just a hurdle.”