Among the many high-level jobs at mobile network operators, few are more consequential than those tasked with converting a 5G network into a money-making machine. That responsibility at T-Mobile US falls largely on John Saw, the operator’s EVP of advanced and emerging technologies.

“My job at T-Mobile is to find ways to leverage this network and improve our customer experience. So we want to find use cases and work with smart people, inventors, and innovative startups to find new use cases that will leverage the 5G network,” Saw told SDxCentral in a phone interview.

This puts the unmet potential of mobile connectivity and services for enterprises squarely in his sights, especially considering the unlikelihood that smartphone users will pay operators more to access 5G. 

“Enterprise has been an increasingly strong focus for us. And one of our priorities is to dramatically grow our enterprise and government space by leveraging our 5G network superiority, as well as the new scale that we can bring to the table,” said Saw, the former CTO at Sprint, which merged with T-Mobile last year. “Enterprises are looking to us, not just for mobility needs, but also for more advanced network solutions that 5G can bring to the table.”

The wireless industry veteran has been working at network operators for 24 years. And he’s especially optimistic about 5G because it’s “the first G in wireless that is really designed from the ground up to solve a lot the use cases that the enterprises will need to transform their business,” he said, describing 4G LTE as a generic data layer.

“With 5G there are capabilities and features that have been designed into it like low latency, ultra reliability, low battery [and] low power capabilities for a massive number of machines. All this will help businesses and transform the enterprises,” Saw said.

T-Mobile US is not alone among operators trying to find new ways to put 5G networks to use for enterprises. The carrier opened a 5G Open Innovation Lab near its headquarters in Bellevue, Washington last year, runs a series of business accelerator programs, and manages a venture fund that it uses to “invest directly in promising companies that can help us further our cause in terms of 5G capabilities and other priorities that we need” to fulfill, he explained. 

“All this put together is part of our effort to build something that's bigger than ourselves. We know that we can build the best 5G network in the country, but a lot of smart ideas and cool use use cases are going to come from a lot of different places, from the enterprises themselves, from startups who are trying to disrupt the various vertical spaces, be it health care, or utilities, or manufacturing,” Saw said. “We want to be the catalyst for these guys to innovate, we want to be the catalyst for them to disrupt. And that is why you see on the technology side, our strong focus on building an ecosystem of developers.”

The rise of 5G has presented mobile network operators with an opportunity to start evolving their role and become more than a pipe that sells lines of service. However, because 5G introduces so many advanced capabilities, T-Mobile US wants to partner with many other companies and enterprises to help solve unique pain points.

“You cannot do this from afar, and you cannot do this by just selling them lines,” he said.

The operator is also exploring other 5G-enabled capabilities like network slicing that will enable it to offer a provisional slice or particular quality of service for a specialized use case for enterprises, he said. This, too, requires partnerships and that has led T-Mobile to work with systems integrators and various enterprises in different industries to realize those outcomes.

“I think, unlike LTE, it is going to be less of a hands-off approach, but more of a partnership approach as we work with different enterprises and partners to bring some of these capabilities to life,” Saw said. 

“5g is a catalyst for all this. We can bring the lower latency computational capabilities to enable, finally, artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms in real time to all these enterprises in locations distributed all over factory floors, in parking lots, all around cities,” he said. “The more I think about it, the more excited I get, because the truth of this is it cannot be done in isolation, we have to work in partnership with municipalities, with cities, and with enterprises to make all these things real.”