Transforming the retail experience

T-Mobile has always put its customers first, and as part of its mission to deliver the best network and the best value, the wireless leader knew it would need to upgrade network capabilities at thousands of stores to keep up with modern demands to create the best experiences possible when visiting its stores.

“We believe that new technology should not just be a replacement, but support our long-term vision,” said Ryan Hollinger, Senior Director of IP and Security Architecture at T-Mobile.

The company was an early adopter of Mist Wi-Fi for its offices. After years of proven performance in its offices and an extensive evaluation of Juniper’s wireless, wired, and SD-WAN solutions for the retail use case, T-Mobile selected the Juniper’s AI-native full stack platform for its stores.

“Mist brings wireless, switching, and routing under one umbrella, allowing us to manage the networking for our stores and offices through a unified view,” said Tamas Felker, Senior Manager of IP and Security Architecture at T-Mobile. “Juniper offers automation and advanced analytics that will be critical to streamline deployment and take full ownership of the network life cycle.”

Juniper’s AI-native networking platform is built from the ground up to leverage a common cloud and AI engine across wireless, wired, and SD-WAN domains. With Juniper, T-Mobile can assure that every connection is reliable, measurable, and secure while streamlining network operations.

With Juniper’s AI-native network and a tunnel-free SD-WAN architecture, T-Mobile can now measure users’ network experience at the stores. Real-time client-level insights are correlated across the full stack to proactively resolve and ensure exceptional user experiences for customers and store associates. Zero Trust ensures connectivity and customer purchases are more secure from start to finish.

 Clear visibility and precision troubleshooting find hidden issues
As the T-Mobile team began to roll out the Juniper routers, Mist AI shed light on several problems that were impacting broadband circuit uptime. With Juniper’s AIOps troubleshooting tools—and the data to back up the findings—the teams from T-Mobile, Juniper, and the broadband providers easily collaborated and quickly resolved the issues.

“Circuit issues are infamous among retailers as they are typically hard to detect and isolate,” said Hollinger. “Mist AI supplies us with the data to quickly pinpoint any problems and make the necessary changes.”

 Streamline the network life cycle
“With Juniper’s suite of intelligent and automated tools, we can minimize the number of resources needed to deploy and manage the network life cycle,” said Felker. “We can support a growing number of stores without increasing our IT headcount.”