US mobile operator T-Mobile is claiming to be redefining business broadband with its SuperBroadband product, in collaboration with satellite leader Starlink.
The mobile operator said that to date, businesses have had to deal with inconsistent reliability, limited coverage and too much complexity.
It stressed that reliability in communications isn’t optional for businesses – it’s mission-critical, and cited research from IDC calculating that even minutes of downtime can carry a steep price, with losses averaging more than $100,000 per hour across industries.
To protect against this, T-Mobile said many organisations have been forced to add a second ISP for redundancy, but that only works if a second provider is available.
In particular, it observed that business in remote and rural areas are often underserved by legacy ISPs operating as regional monopolies, leaving gaps where entire areas are beyond the reach of traditional or wired providers.
For organisations with multiple locations, T-Mobile warned that finding and managing primary and backup providers introduces a lot of complexity. It said one study found that enterprise businesses could have more than 20 different ISPs servicing their locations.
The net result, said the operator, was that for far too long, such businesses have been burdened with stitching together regional and local internet providers, incompatible hardware, and disparate management tools from multiple suppliers – each with separate contracts, rate plans and support models. This, it said, was a logistical nightmare for all firms, but for small and medium-sized businesses without the time or IT capacity to manage this complexity, it meant reliable connectivity felt out of reach.
The operator heralded SuperBroadband as the solution to these issues, no less than “rewriting” the rules of connectivity, “shattering conventions that have long defined business internet”.
“With SuperBroadband, we’re not just improving broadband – we’re redefining it,” claimed André Almeida, president of growth and emerging businesses at T-Mobile. “This is about taking the complexity out of connectivity and replacing it with virtually unbreakable connectivity to inspire confidence, so businesses of any size can focus on outcomes, not obstacles.”
Combining what is claimed to be the US’s largest 5G network with Starlink, the owner of the world’s largest low-Earth orbit satellite fleet – the service is said to be able to extend coverage to effectively every business location in the US.
It is designed to help businesses stay online through virtually all outages and disruptions with independent 5G and Starlink pathways. These are attributed with delivering built-in redundancy that is said to be beyond legacy services.
Outdoor 5G equipment enhances signal strength and extends access to T-Mobile’s network, while routers bring connections together into a single, resilient offering. SuperBroadband then intelligently orchestrates 5G and Starlink in real time to maintain uptime and performance without manual intervention.
The infrastructure is supported by Ericsson Enterprise Wireless Solutions’ NetCloud Manager for centralised control of the latest Cradlepoint routers and outdoor adapters. Businesses can gain visibility and control across their entire network through T-Platform. This unified portfolio platform provides a centralised management experience, including real-time insights into hardware, performance, usage and health, along with backup readiness and failover events.
Starlink and T-Mobile say that the net result of the partnership is that enterprises can deploy their IT teams on projects that are more strategic than connectivity while smaller businesses can finally access the kind of reliability and support that has only been available to the largest customers in the past.
“Integrating Starlink with T-Mobile 5G brings reliable, high-performance broadband to businesses with mission-critical operations where downtime costs thousands per hour,” said Jason Fritch, vice-president of Starlink enterprise sales at SpaceX. “Setup is quick and easy, delivering immediate productivity even in the most remote locations. Uniting T-Mobile 5G with Starlink helps keep operations running when other paths fail, and extends connectivity to millions of new locations.”
