But look for 5G revenues in 2020, not 2019
With its 5G Home residential broadband service up and running in four U.S. markets–Sacramento, Los Angeles, Houston and Indianapolis–Verizon Chief Financial Officer Matt Ellis this week discussed what to expect through 2019 as the company looks to expand and diversify its 5G service revenues.
Ellis, speaking Nov. 14 at the Morgan Stanley European Technology, Media and Telecom Conference in Barcelona, said he sees 5G service revenue coming from the residential broadband service, which is focused outside of the operator’s Fios footprint; mobility; and B2B offerings.
“We expect to see migration over to 5G as the network becomes available and handsets become available because of the increase in the quality of the core connectivity and then the applications that will be developed using that connectivity over the next few years. So that second stream is the mobility piece. We believe, because of the way we’re building the 5G network to deliver the full functionality that 5G offers, that there’s going to be the opportunity to — as in previous generations, to increase market share in the mobility space.
“The B2B side is going to be far greater as you go into 5G than it is in previous generations. Because of the massive throughput, because of the low latency and a whole host of the other improvements with 5G, we think, over time, the B2B adoption of applications and technologies using 5G in ways that fundamentally changes how their business is run is a significant upside as well. So you’ve got three major revenue streams versus really only having one of those in 4G and prior technologies. And as we think about the overall 5G model, it’s based off increasing the revenue streams available to us.”
But in terms of the company’s expected financial performance, Ellis said there would not be a “massive impact on revenue in 2019” but he expects 5G to “have an impact on the financial starting in 2020.”
The exec also provided some commentary on the decision to go-to-market with a flavor of 5G based on the Verizon Technical Forum standard, which he credited with an acceleration of the 3GPP process. “The amount of equipment that we have on the proprietary standard is fairly limited, whether that be the network equipment of the customer premise equipment…Obviously we want to transition to the global standard as soon as equipment is available.”
