“We have a plan to have 30 5G cities by year-end,” says Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg. “We are at 13 right now so we’re adding every week. We added New York last week. We have also updated 13 NFL stadiums with 5G and the NBA season hasn’t even started. We believe that our 5G for the consumer is just crushing it. That’s where we are focusing right now on our mobility build. We also do 5G Home. In the fourth quarter, we are going to launch our 5G Mobile Edge Compute which is an enterprise service with the all-new capabilities of 5G.”
Hans Vestberg, CEO of Verizon Communications, discusses where the company is at in its 5G build-out and how 5G is going to be a dramatic technology shift for consumers and enterprises in an interview on Bloomberg Technology:
We Plan to Have 30 5G Cities By Year-End
For the mobility case, we have a plan to have 30 5G cities by year-end. We are at 13 right now so we’re adding every week. We added New York last week. We have also updated 13 NFL stadiums with 5G and the NBA season hasn’t even started. We believe that our 5G for the consumer is just crushing it. That’s where we are focusing right now on our mobility build. We also do 5G Home. In the fourth quarter, we are going to launch our 5G Mobile Edge Compute which is an enterprise service with the all-new capabilities of 5G.
We have the best 4G network in the market and we will continue to see that our customers get the best experience on the technology we have. We are giving them the first experience on 5G. We were first with the 5G Home and we were first with a 5G smartphone. At the same time, we keep our 4G network (state of the art). We will continue to do that and when we see that the market is ready then we will have national 5G coverage as well. Usually, we speak less and we execute when we have it and then we talk. That’s our strategy.
5G To Enable Factory Wireless For All Robots
I think that all (consumers and businesses) will benefit from 5G but the bonus design from the beginning was very much to make the world cordless for enterprise in society. So the 5G mobile edge compute where we’re going to launch the first Center at the end of this year, that’s really where you can as an enterprise start innovating. You can implement factory wireless for all your robots for example, or put up a 5G campus network, or a private 5G network. This is all with throughput speed and latency that is unparalleled to what you have today. Suddenly you can innovate around that.
I have met many of the 1,400 enterprises in this country over the last six months to talk to them and show them the platform that we’re going to create and how they can innovate to it. This is a partnership between us with the customer and probably in some cases some software developers as well that have software that is needed for it.
5G To Make Home Internet Wireless
Going from 3G to 4G was, of course, an improvement in latency and speed which was visible. But the movement from 4G to 5G is even greater. The speed is so much faster, the throughput is so much more, and the latency (is 10 times better). Of course, it’s all about an ecosystem where you get devices out. Sometimes we talk a lot about consumers and right now we have four phones already out now in the market and all of them are 5G enabled. We see that the whole ecosystem coming from consumers.
Then you have an enterprise business and we also have a 5G home business. We’re actually doing a lot more with 5G instead of fiber. This is a totally different way of thinking about the business model for fixed wireless access bringing broadband to your home. 5G is very different because you can have several business cases on the same infrastructure. It’s the same network and it’s the same infrastructure below. It’s not a separate network for all these business cases we are talking about.