Verizon CEO Sees Home Broadband As A Big Opportunity

At the UBS Global Media and Communications Conference, Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg touted the carrier’s 5G home residential broadband service as complementing its wired Fios offering while extending the ability to provide a wireless alternative to home connectivity. While the fixed wireless access service is only available in 4 markets, the carrier said half of the customers are new to the company.

In a discussion with John Hodulik of UBS Investment Bank and HSBC analyst Sunil Rajgopal, Vestberg said 5G Home comes with a guaranteed 300 Mbps but its millimeter wave spectrum can support up to 800 Mbps or 900 Mbps.

“It is a totally different way to doing broadband, meaning, instead of having a cord into the house, you have a wireless wave into the house, but the experience is the same in the house. And I think that is a big opportunity for us. We have one footprint of Home, and that is the Northeast where we have our Fios footprint. For the rest of the country, we do not have it. So of course, we see that as an opportunity.”

As the carriers invests in enhancements to its LTE network while working to build-out and scale 5G, Vestberg in November announced a reorganization dividing the company into three parts, Verizon Consumer Group, Verizon Business Group and Verizon Media Group.  Each of the 3 groups will share corporate-wide professional resources related to the network, IT and staff support.

Consumer includes wireless and wireline and is headed by EVP and Verizon Wireless President Ronan Dunne; business includes wireless and wireline for enterprise, small and medium businesses and government, and the telematics business; and media, which comprises the Oath assets, will be headed by Oath CEO Guru Gowrappan. That group is described as sitting “at the intersection of media, advertising and technology, helping people access and receive media, entertainment, gaming, news, commerce and other services.”

In response to a question at the conference, Vestberg said the re-org followed transformations of the carrier’s network, process and business. “What we are trying to do is, of course, putting that network, the strength of the company and distribution together in order to leverage the next generation of technology, which is 5G and other technologies. So you need to put that last piece in a much broader transformation that is ongoing in the company, starting already in 2017 with the network transformation.”— RCR Wireless News