What’s forward for Verizon’s community in 2024? Joe Russo, the service’s EVP and president of world networks and expertise, mentioned among the deployment tendencies and buyer calls for that the cellular community operator is seeing as 5G continues to evolve.
Russo spoke at this week’s Wells Fargo seventh Annual TMT Summit Convention, addressing questions on Mounted Wi-fi Entry (FWA), the continued C-Band deployment, enterprise use of personal networks and extra.
Right here’s a few of what he needed to say:
On personal networks: “The personal community house is basically constructing,” Russo advised moderater and senior analyst Eric Luebchow of Wells Fargo, including that Verizon is more and more seeing enterprise prospects who’ve tried a non-public community coming again to them to do extra due to the issues that it solves. As well as, Russo stated, “By having … deployments in place at ports, at manufacturing amenities, at NFL stadiums, now we’re in a position to additionally present different firms, these are the type of issues we’re fixing. So you probably have … issues with a hard and fast or a Wi-Fi community, personal networks are the answer. We’ve confirmed them out.
“Lot of consumers are doing take a look at circumstances to test us just a little bit, however that momentum is certainly constructing,” he stated, happening so as to add, “We’re seeing momentum going into ’24. The size of it, I’d say we nonetheless have loads to find out about how large it will get, however we’re positively seeing momentum construct going into 2024. The pipeline could be very sturdy.”
On enterprise FWA: “We’re seeing increasingly more enterprises look to us to make use of fastened wi-fi entry, each for backup and first connections,” Russo stated. “If they’ve branches throughout the nation, [these businesses] need entry to that type of throughput in the entire branches. In order we proceed to roll out Mounted Wi-fi Entry past the suburban and dense city areas, it provides us increasingly more alternative to additionally seize among the enterprise use circumstances as effectively.”
On C-Band: Russo described a shift with Verizon’s C-Band deployment, from an preliminary deal with city areas within the prime 46 Partial Financial Areas (geographic licensing areas) and surpassing 230 million coated POPs. He stated Verizon’s aim is to deploy C-Band spectrum on its current macro web site community in all 406 PEAs, which is able to occur over the following couple of years and “comply with the place buyer demand is. So the place we see we’d like capability, protection or capabilities within the community, that’s the place we’ll goal subsequent.” As well as, Verizon may also goal C-Band enlargement in areas the place it’s more likely to carry on further FWA prospects, Russo added. “Over the following couple of years, we’ll be rolling out into the extra suburban and rural areas with the intent of actually protecting our current macro community with C-Band,” he stated.
On millimeter-wave spectrum: “We love our millimeter wave spectrum,” Russo declared. “We’re utilizing it in new and other ways than we even considered few years in the past. … It’s an amazing device in our toolbox to deal with capability and to permit prospects to do issues they by no means may do earlier than in sure areas.” He stated that whereas Verizon first targeted on mmWave in venues and dense city areas, “now we’re beginning to use it in many alternative areas, seashores, in open air venues, in downtown city areas to actually give prospects the type of expertise that they couldn’t do … the place plenty of folks collect they usually wished to do issues.” He went on to quote the instance of Taylor Swift live shows the place Verizon prospects wish to seize and stream the expertise to others. “There’s no manner we will ship that type of expertise for our prospects with out millimeter wave,” he stated.
On Open RAN: “If I take a look at the efficiency of the O-RAN at this level, it could possibly’t do the type of issues like huge MIMO at 16 [transmit]-16 [receive, or] 64T/64R, these type of efficiency measures. We’re simply not there but. And till we’re, it doesn’t have a spot essentially within the type of efficiency that I wish to ship to my prospects,” Russo concluded.
On total community densification and fiber deployment: “We’re type of on a gentle path of including macros and small cells to densify the community the place we see capability or protection wants,” Russo stated, together with macro web site modifications to proceed including C-Band spectrum over the following couple of years. “I’m unsure that past that, I see an actual must additional densify,” he continued, however added the caveat that it’s a “watch and see” scenario which will change relying on new 5G use circumstances that emerge. “We positively are beginning to dream just a little bit about, what does the long run 5G Extremely Wideband community appear to be?” he supplied, however stated that it will likely be “use-case pushed” based mostly upon which enterprise or client 5G use circumstances choose up velocity and require further densification as a way to assist them.
