Like a big animal awakening from hibernation, America is stirring from its quarantine-induced slumber. Verizon has a front row seat to what Time Magazine termed “The Great Reopening” of the country, Hans Vestberg, CEO of Verizon Communications, told Phil Cusick, Managing Director of J.P. Morgan, during the J.P. Morgan Technology, Media Communications and Conference last week.
“We are seeing good traction in our stores, with much more traffic coming into them,” Vestberg said. “So clearly we definitely see that the market is coming back around.”
Cell tower handovers, which were down in some urban areas up to 70 percent during the last year, according to Vestberg, have almost recovered to pre-COVID numbers. “People are moving around much more,” he said. “We’ll see a steep curve depending upon how people return to urban areas in our distribution chains.”
2021 will also serve as the launch pad for Verizon’s 5G Home Fixed Wireless Access [FWA], which will be rolled out to 50 million households with a combination of 4G and 5G, using millimeter wave and C-band spectrum by the end of the year, Vestberg said.
“I see a great opportunity for our small and medium businesses to get rapid access to broadband by using fixed wireless access, instead of waiting for internet connections through fiber that take a longer time and will be much more complicated,” Vestberg said.
Vestberg said that Verizon’s FWA business will not compete with the operator’s broadband business, which it offers through the Fios (bundled fiber-optic internet access, telephone, and television service) in nine states.
“So we’re opening [FWA] up, open for sale right now,” Vestberg said. “The size of the market is a great opportunity, rather than a risk, and for us it’s accretive to our bottom line.”
The deployment of FWA adds to the ways Verizon plans to monetize its network, Vestberg said. Essentially, the operator is building one network and then providing multiple ways to access it, whether that is mobility, mobile edge computing or FWA. This allows the operator to make economic sense out of its capex budget.
“We have all the economics to activate and scale billing-as-a-service, distribution-as-a-service and CRM [customer relationship management],” he said. “So basically, all platforms now can be scaled until we get to the customer offering and there of course we learn what type of access they want.”
Eventually, the FWA network will be built out nationwide. Anywhere Verizon provides mobility, it can offer FWA, Vestberg said. “Technically, anywhere we have mobility, we can do fixed access,” he said. “It’s just that you need a certain amount of scale when you come into a zip code in order to commit to all the distribution, marketing and other resources.”
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