Verizon is offering mobile 5G services in Chicago and Minneapolis with plans to expand to 20 more cities this year. This week the operator began selling the Samsung Galaxy S10 5G smartphone and independent field testing is showing downlink speeds anywhere from 500 Mbps to nearly 1.5 Gbps on the millimeter wave network.
And this is just the beginning according to CEO Hans Vestberg who spokes this week at the J.P. Morgan Global Technology, Media and Communications Conference.
“I think if you ask, the next few years, I think the majority of our map will have 5G,” Vestberg said in an interview. “We’re excited over this phone because we’re exclusive on the Samsung 5G phone as well. We think it’s a good thing.”
Underlying Verizon’s 5G deployment plans is a strong focus on building out fiber rings. In fact, Corning has opened a factory specifically to keep up with Verizon’s demand for fiber.
Vestberg said, in terms of monetization, fiber serves consumers, large enterprises, small and medium businesses and for wholesale purposes.
“The best way for us is build it ourselves. So we are building fiber right now. We announced in the second and in the first quarter earnings that we are now having 1,000 fiber miles a month is the speed we’re doing, which probably is–no one else in this country is even close.” Those builds are currently focused on 60 markets.
He continued: “We’re not building point-to-point. That’s a big difference from an architectural point of view because if you build rings, of course you can serve so much more and you can monetize [the]assets even better.”
The goal of this fiber investment, Vestberg said, “is to serve the fiber-rich network to get the customer even greater experience and actually have a better network than anybody else in the market.”
