Network Slicing for Fun, Performance, and Security

The concept of network slicing first emerged in the cellular world and is now being applied to fiber broadband networks, providing a path to new services for consumers and new differentiators for operators. GFiber and others are moving network slicing into the arena of the practical, with other service providers not far behind in dreaming up new applications for consumers and businesses.

By and large, while today’s internet traffic is all treated equally, customers have substantial variation in how they use their connections. Hardcore gamers want to optimize their entire networks for that application. Work-from-home (WFH) employees desire videoconferencing to work properly and seamlessly without lag or jitter. Network slicing enables the creation of virtual, dedicated lanes for specific traffic, and GFiber wanted to see if the technology made a difference with the 10Gig+ higher-speed service tiers.

“Most traffic in the home is on Wi-Fi,” said Nick Saporito, Head of Product, GFiber, on the September 3, 2025, Fiber for Breakfast podcast. “There are still congestion issues on Wi-Fi, so we do think that there’s a challenge that [network slicing] can help overcome. The other piece here is latency is having a moment right now, and we think that moment is here to stay.”

Lower latency is needed for a variety of residential and commercial use cases relying on high-quality, real-time communications including live streaming, virtual reality, and AI. “When you think about it, latency is actually what the customer is feeling the most in terms of customer experience, like when something’s not loading instantly, it’s actually latency,” Saporito said. “It’s not a bandwidth problem, that’s a latency issue. We partnered with Nokia, who was our primary OLT vendor, to demonstrate network slicing technology over PON for a lot of reasons. One of the core drivers for GFiber on this technology asks is there a way to offer our customers more value and customization? As an industry, we keep on giving customers a bigger pipe to the home and it’s kind of a one-size-fits-all pipe we keep upsizing. As we think about 10 Gig+ networks to the home, we’re asking ourselves internally if there is a play or does it drive customer value to give those customers more control over the pipe? Should they be able to customize that pipe to their specific use cases?”

Network slicing would also provide benefits for operators, enabling them to optimize their network usage more efficiently, with the potential for less traffic flowing across upstream transit connections where costs are assessed by the amount of data flowing through them.

Slicing a Product

But the challenge is in how network slicing is presented by the service provider. “How you productize this with your customer?” said Saporito. “This is a really complicated technology. You’re essentially standing up on demand EVPN services for a residential customer. That is very complicated. And you can’t have a conversation about network slicing without also having a conversation about network automation almost in parallel, because you can’t have one without the other. It would be incredibly challenging to productize network slicing without a high level of network automation, which is another hot button topic in our industry today. Network automation also ties back to AI discussions that everybody’s having right now, and we’re all trying to kind of grapple with what that means for all of us.”

Recognizing that GFiber is in its very early days on how to present network slicing, its first cut for rolling it out as a service would provide customers with the ability to put their network connection into certain optimized modes, similar to how newer cars can be put into different modes by pressing a button, such as switching from normal driving into traction control during bad weather and road conditions.

“Maybe your customer is a hardcore gamer and they can go through our app and put their internet pipe into gaming mode, where we actually create slices to the top 10 gaming platforms that customer uses,” said Saporito. “Maybe there’s a work-from-home mode where we prioritize or we create dedicated lanes to Google Meet or Microsoft Teams or whatever that customer uses for their work-from-home situation.”

AI comes into the conversation since a network agent could tell if a customer is working from home and using applications which would benefit from lower latency, then provide the customer with the option to switch on the mode for better performance during their normal work hours or as needed for lower latency when using real-time applications.

The Security Slice, the AI Slice

A third use case is for providing enhanced security during financial and other transactions. “I think this [application] may become a linchpin for this technology, given the trends around cybersecurity,” said Saporito. “If a customer is logging into their financial institution, maybe we as an ISP create a transactional, temporary slice from that customer to the financial institution for additional security. When they’re done with their online banking activity, that slice goes away automatically.”

Other potential use cases for network slicing could be faster ways to deliver network software updates and AI/VR events when ultra-low latency is vital for a usable experience. But implementing any sort of network slicing product will require a parallel conversation about network automation, since trying to implement and operate the process in a manual fashion is much too complex to be scalable. It also may require a regulatory discussion.

“At the end of the day for GFiber, what it boils down to is giving our customers more control,” said Saporito. “We’re giving them very large pipes to the home, whether it’s 3 Gig, 8 Gig, or more in the future. Does it behoove us to give them more options to control that pipe? We think the answer is probably yes, but we have to do it the thoughtful way, in a way that makes sense to our customers and really drives that customer value.”

The customer value GFiber would be delivering would be network customization, based upon the needs and desires of the customers. Saporito believes the customer has to decide how to optimize their connection, rather than the operator dictating how the network and applications should be configured. And it likely won’t be a value-added service, but a bundled feature.

“We’re giving consumers data center level connectivity to their home [with 10G+ speeds],” said Saporito. “We’re asking ourselves, should we give them more ISP-like controls over the routing of their traffic in this concept of having a personal ISP? As we think about the future use cases of AI, VR, AR, etc., is there a play there, not just for the bandwidth, but for the latency benefits that can come with it?”