T-Mobile US ended last year with the significant launch of a Cisco-powered cloud-native 5G core gateway platform that sets up the operator to more quickly standup new services and can help it better monetize its 5G network investments. The deal also deepened Cisco’s work in updating the carrier’s rapidly evolving network architecture.

The update included T-Mobile US turning on Cisco’s 8000 Series routers, 5G and 4G LTE packet core gateways, its Unified Computing System (UCS) platform, and Cisco’s Nexus 9000 Series Switches that run the vendor’s Network Services Orchestrator for full-stack automation. This powers T-Mobile US’ 5G standalone (SA) core that is based on Cisco’s cloud-native control plane and uses Kubernetes to orchestrate containers running on bare metal.

The deployment is distributed across T-Mobile US’ facilities and on-premises private cloud infrastructure using the Cisco equipment. Matt Price, VP of engineering for Cisco’s Provider Mobility Group, explained in an interview with SDxCentral that T-Mobile US is running the system with Cisco assisting where necessary.

T-Mobile US noted the automation simplifies “network functions across the cloud, edge, and data centers to significantly reduce operational lifecycle management.” The distributed nature of the 5G SA core deployment also provides a reported 10% improvement in speed and latency, which is key for mobile edge computing use cases.

“T-Mobile has deployed [this infrastructure] in many dozens of different sites, so not only [do] they take a look at their regions and distribute this widely, but they are doing some edge location with customers as well,” Price said. “I think this is really more immediately focused on getting this distributed out to the entire nationwide footprint and putting the core and gateways in locations as close to their end users as possible to really start to drive the value of low-latency 5G connectivity.”

The deployment also speeds the ability for T-Mobile US to spin up new services.

“I think they're seeing something on the order of a 60% increase in deployment time due to the automation across the network, and that's enabling them to roll out new code at a pace that would have been unheard of before,” Price explained.

T-Mobile US previously noted the platform will also allow it to more quickly test and deploy new services at scale. It cited specific 5G and IoT services, including its rapidly expanding fixed-wireless access (FWA) Home Internet service, the always popular network slicing, and voice over 5G (VoNR).

Price explained that T-Mobile US is able to take advantage of the platform’s cloud-native environment to drive automation deeper into its network operations.

“They're able to drive things at incredible pace and speed because of the way that a cloud-native environment allows you to do administration and that automation and administration through cloud-native components has really enabled an enormous increase in productivity and the ability to move faster,” Price said.

That cloud-native layer is also getting a performance and efficiency boost from a bare metal base.

“It really allowed us to fine tune the performance, to get really high-level performance on the data plane to help drive both the performance and the capacity of the network to significantly reduced the power required to meet the throughput that they're seeing now with this 5G network,” Price said. “They've driven performance to the end user and the amount of bandwidth being consumed is going up and so the ability to deliver that increase in bandwidth requirements consumption from customers at high performance and without incurring significant power and space costs is a really important piece and the way we've deployed with our container platform on their bare metal has really allowed us to meet the challenge.”

The move also allows T-Mobile US to further update its network operations. The carrier has been operating several different network iterations due to both its own legacy systems as well as those inherited when it acquired Sprint. It’s now quickly moving to consolidate those systems and precious spectrum resources to its newer network platforms.

A T-Mobile US spokesperson explained that the carrier’s initial 5G SA core ran on an “older Cisco platform and only supported” the 5G SA core. “This new platform is cloud native and not only supports [5G SA] technology but legacy 4G technology all on the same converged node.”

This means T-Mobile US can run nearly all of its voice and data traffic on this cloud-native 5G SA core, including its recently expanded 5G VoNR service. As that service gains 4G LTE voice (VoLTE) converts, the carrier will eventually be able to scrape more spectrum resources from that network to bolster its 5G network.