T-Mobile Now Serving Up High-Performance 5G 'Network Slicing'

pcmag.com:

Serving up something good one slice at a time isn’t just for pizza; it’s also been a longtime goal of 5G. And now after years of “network slicing” not living up to earlier delivery predictions, T-Mobile says it’s begun offering this high-performance flavor of 5G wireless to customers.

In a post Monday on T-Mobile’s corporate blog, EVP and chief technology officer John Saw recounted how T-Mobile had staged a first-ever commercial deployment of network slicing to support Red Bull’s 2023 Cliff Diving World Series in Boston. 

Saw writes that the carrier provided a virtualized slice of its 5G network for Red Bull’s exclusive use so that it could “easily and quickly transfer high-resolution content from cameras and a video drone circling the event to the Red Bull production team in near real-time over T-Mobile 5G” at speeds that topped out at 276Mbps.

And because this slice was cut off from the rest of T-Mobile’s network, this traffic didn’t slow down device use for T-Mobile subscribers at that June event. Saw compared that to the robotaxi meltdown that hit San Francisco in August, when a network traffic jam led to a physical traffic jam as a cluster of Cruise self-driving cars stopped in streets. 

(Cruise doesn’t advertise which carrier it uses; the 2021 announcement of a collaboration between AT&T and Cruise’s parent company GM to provide 5G connectivity to its cars could be a clue, but Cruise’s PR department did not answer a query emailed Monday morning.) 

Network slicing was one of the original sales pitches for 5G, and constituted a germ of technological truth inside vaporous claims that 5G would make self-driving cars possible. But making slicing a commercial reality has proved to be much more complicated than lighting