T-Mobile accelerates innovation and customer experience with Azure-powered analytics

T-Mobile is known for its customer obsession and has earned its brand as the “Un-carrier.” It maintains a leading position among mobile providers with its 5G offering, continuous network development and growth, and speed and agility in meeting customer needs. When T-Mobile set out to merge with Sprint in 2020, it wasn’t just about combining networks—it was about preserving the “Un-carrier” promise for more than 120 million customers and delivering a better network experience.

To keep its brand promise and achieve greater efficiencies, T-Mobile leaned heavily on analytics to provide the right insight at the right time for customer migration while reconfiguring its network. Peter Huang, Sr. Director of Network Data & AI at T-Mobile, and his team provided the critical data foundation to accomplish this mission.

Using the very latest technology to enhance operational visibility and drive innovation, the team delivered data platforms that ingested trillions of records per day and turned them into actionable insights.

Empowering data-driven decisions with Azure

Prior to the merger, T-Mobile had made the strategic decision to move key aspects of its business to the cloud. This was critical for the merger to be successful, making the company more agile as it began processing multi-petabytes of data. Ingesting more than 800 terabytes of data per day, T-Mobile turned to Microsoft Azure to bring its new hybrid data strategy to life.

Microsoft Azure delivered dynamic scalability, but the even greater benefit was gaining an increased understanding of the customer experience. For example, T-Mobile could now pinpoint the location where an issue might be developing and address it quickly, keeping its network running smoothly.

This visibility is critical in handling massive amounts of data from across the company’s operations, so T-Mobile is employing several solutions as part of its enhanced technology ecosystem. Using products such as Azure Data Explorer and Azure Databricks together provides a powerful, complementary approach to managing and analyzing large-scale data—especially in real-time, high-throughput environments. This combination helps to unify more than 60 data sources for T-Mobile.

“Microsoft has been a valuable co-innovation collaborator throughout our journey. Its robust technology stack played a pivotal role in accelerating our growth. By using a best-of-breed selection from Microsoft’s services, we’ve optimized our data pipelines and improved network performance, delivering measurable benefits directly to our customers,” says Anand Muttayane, Member of Technical Staff, Network Data & AI at T-Mobile.

Azure Databricks improves data management and accessibility across T-Mobile’s business units via a centralized data lake. The solution accelerates analytics processes, reduces data latency, and supports both structured streaming and batch data for personalized customer experiences and automated workflows. In addition, Azure Databricks helps T-Mobile achieve operational efficiencies through optimized job execution and reduced infrastructure overhead.

Azure is delivering business-critical insights to fuel innovation for T-Mobile’s industry-leading network performance, products, and services. The ability to expand storage and compute resources as needed means T-Mobile can stitch together trillions of data points from multiple sources across its network platforms. The agility of the Azure platform is offering new levels of responsiveness to the data analytics process, keeping results fresh and relevant.

Visibility and scalability on demand in a highly secure environment

Azure Databricks and Azure Data Lake Storage work closely together to provide a powerful data processing and storage solution. T-Mobile began adding multiple scalable analytics services, making it possible for the team to access capabilities it never had before.

“Using Microsoft Azure, we’ve empowered enterprise teams to accelerate business-critical initiatives by building secure, scalable, and high-performance cloud platforms. Our focus on AI, automation, and cloud-native architecture has ensured faster delivery, greater agility, and continuous innovation—while reinforcing T-Mobile’s strong foundation of security and reliability,” explains Vikas Ranjan, Senior Manager, Network Data & AI at T-Mobile.

In addition, Azure infrastructure has vastly improved data usability at T-Mobile, further increasing the value of the company’s data for business analytics. Power BI on Azure, along with custom-built applications, provided multiple ways for users to innovate and solve problems.

Enhancing agility, increasing ROI, and driving growth

From a business perspective, T-Mobile has identified multiple benefits in the form of greater business agility and time to market for new offerings—all of which enhance the customer experience.

The team supports the planning and development of new products and services with greater breadth and availability of user behavior and analytics data. By processing more data at faster speeds, T-Mobile has a more comprehensive and current view of how the network is performing. It also knows how the network’s being used and where to introduce new features. The new cloud infrastructure makes collaborating on products and services easier and faster, speeding development, removing friction, and simplifying deployment and operation.

On-demand scalability is a key component of business optimization, and the company had previously faced challenges with scaling the environment to provide the required depth of visibility into a rapidly growing network. So, T-Mobile built a completely open-source processing solution that runs on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and Data Lake Storage, scaling up or down based on the workload.

Optimization from shutting down unnecessary resources, particularly after the merger, has also been realized through the company’s increased visibility into its expanding network.

“With Azure, T-Mobile has a solid foundation for our ongoing AI journey. We’re exploring new ways to use AI to empower our teams with timely insights that enhance how we serve customers. This ensures that T-Mobile can continue delivering a deeply personalized experience across the entire network,” concludes Huang.

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