T-Mobile for Business, the carrier’s business-focused division, continues to leverage the company’s 5G Advanced network to offer unique products and services to potential business customers. This is an area for growth for the company, at the same time it has a very strong consumer business that continues to fire on all cylinders; the company recently reported strong earnings for Q1 and guided upward for the full year.
One of T-Mobile for Business’s newest offerings is SuperMobile, which is a business mobile plan that incorporates a network slice for business users, paired with additional security and satellite connectivity. This sets the stage for SuperBroadband, which is T-Mobile’s new approach to business broadband.
SuperBroadband is T-Mobile’s turnkey solution for business broadband that pairs T-Mobile’s 5G fixed wireless offering with SpaceX’s Starlink to offer two different types of broadband. This creates a complete install, setup, and management solution from T-Mobile with its partners Ericsson, Inseego, and Acuative. SuperBroadband can be used for network failover, with 5G as the primary connection and Starlink satellite as an automatic failover option when 5G drops out. It also automatically switches back to 5G when that network becomes available again. Its other use is as a load-balancing solution, allowing both networks to be active simultaneously and dynamically routing traffic across them based on performance, availability, and application requirements.
The hardware includes a managed 5G router, an optional outdoor 5G gateway, and a Starlink satellite antenna. Ericsson will deploy its E3000 router in the initial launch, but Inseego will follow quickly with its FX4200 router. This solution will use T-Mobile’s T-Platform and leverage the different router companies’ software to manage the connections and failover. T-Mobile also offers SuperBroadband as a three-tier backup, where it would sit behind an existing wired ISP and supply two layers of protection against outages.
T-Mobile claims that SuperBroadband is the first U.S. nationwide business broadband that combines 5G and satellite into a single managed service. While managed service providers (MSPs) and SD-WAN integrators have offered bundled packages that combine cellular backups with fixed wireless access (FWA) or satellite, T-Mobile is the first Tier-1 carrier to natively integrate low earth orbit (LEO) satellite connectivity like Starlink directly into its own managed networking stack.
T-Mobile also claims that SuperBroaband is the only solution that reaches every zip code in the United States, which is true. This is because T-Mobile is able to pair its nationwide 5G network with Starlink to provide the most complete coverage for businesses. Beyond these claims, T-Mobile’s real differentiation is to simplify business internet while also offering redundancy — all in a single package. That package includes installation, configuration, equipment, and management services, all for $250 per month. While $250 may sound like a lot to the average consumer, there are plenty of businesses that are paying similar prices for a sketchy cable or even DSL connection.
The real value of the service comes from having such a complete solution for a single price, along with the promise that multiple layers of redundancy could prevent business losses, for instance if lack of connectivity prevented a business from taking payments or transferring business data. T-Mobile claims four nines of reliability, which means 99.99% uptime — allowing for about 5 minutes of downtime per year.
At the launch event, T-Mobile brought some customers on stage for a panel about deploying SuperBroadband; these included Columbia Sportswear, Aramark Destinations, and Shell. These bigger customers also help T-Mobile tell a simplification story in which its customers no longer need to deploy 20 different ISPs across the country and can simplify their nationwide backup deployments with SuperBroadband.
Right now, SuperBroadband is in its infancy, and I believe it will continue to be built out with help from partners like Inseego. While Ericsson is the initial launch partner, I think it will be interesting to see T-Mobile use other partners later to offer solutions tailored to different customers based on their needs. Additionally, I expect that T-Mobile will offer more versions of SuperBroadband that might add more capabilities to the offering. I think T-Mobile has something meaningful here for all sorts of businesses, and it will be interesting to see how the industry responds, especially as T-Mobile continues to lean into its partnership with Starlink to provide differentiated offerings.
I believe that for T-Mobile to be most successful here, it needs to continue to build relationships with enterprises to become their trusted connectivity provider. It also wouldn’t hurt if we see T-Mobile start to bundle SuperBroadband with SuperMobile for a single price to deliver a complete connectivity solution for businesses. I do think the marketing messaging will be very different for SMBs versus enterprises, and expect that T-Mobile may gain the most momentum with SMBs that are fed up with their current providers and can make the switch relatively easily. It will likely take some enterprise customers longer to make the switch, especially since connectivity contracts tend to be company-wide and negotiated when the contract is up.
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