SVP of Verizon Public Sector: ‘For our public safety customers, it’s really continuing that evolution of digital transformations’
Maggie Hallbach was recently appointed SVP of Verizon Public Sector and not long after both the carrier’s one-year anniversary of its frontline services and the announcement of a nearly $1 billion contract with the Department of Defense, she sat down with RCR Wireless News to share some of Verizon’s visions for a future network bolstered by C-Band.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
Prior to this appointment, you worked in business development for public sector, so you’re coming in with very relevant experience. What are some of your goals in this new position?
We have some very exciting things going on right now at Verizon in the way of our C-Band deployment and building out 5G. 5G comes in many shapes and sizes, and as you know, we launched our mmWave 5G and our nationwide 5G. With the C-Band assets, we have now expanded Ultra Wideband. Combining that with mobile edge computing really gets us to that low-latency promise.
The other area that we are really focused on that piggybacks on [the C-Band] deployment is ubiquitous broadband. We were at the forefront of the COVID crisis with a lot of our government agencies and school districts having to totally upend their operating model, so [we focused on] being able to provide millions of connections for students, for government employees, and then worked with agencies to make their enterprise services available to a remote workforce.
For our public safety customers, it’s really [about] continuing that evolution of digital transformations. So, for a police officer, [it’s] the idea that a police cruiser is really a rolling precinct or office, with a high reliable and secure broadband connection. We are really excited about the promise of 5G mobility.
You mentioned C-Band, but let’s zero in on that. How is C-Band, specifically, helping to deliver on some of those promises?
We want people to think about C-Band not always though a phone and instead think about how many sectors and public workers can benefit: Industrial IoT, social workers, maintenance, transportation. Think about the number of connections that occur in these fields.
With C-Band, we see highly available, highly secure wireless as an access method that really gives our agencies […] high quality options for their remote workforces, small branch offices and even larger locations. As we move to the cloud, more and more applications and data will sit in places other than the location in which the employee is located. C-Band gives you a legitimate alternative to a wired connection and gives you the ability to connect securely from wherever you are. The way [Verizon] envision[s] these deployments is providing that connection whether you are a person, a sensor or machine that needs to access an enterprise application.
It is costly to deploy physical assets all the way to a premise, but when you can do it through a wireless capability, it really become a legitimate alternative to a dedicated network.
Let’s use healthcare as a specific example. How might this highly availability and secure connection provided by C-Band benefit the healthcare system?
Think about a connected healthcare system and the possible wayfinding from the patient with a long-term medical condition, like diabetes, physically moving through a medical system, knowing how to check in, navigating the hospital, knowing when appointments start and stop, having the equipment and the diagnostics that are self-feeding the clinicians that are seeing the patient in a series of coordination care through that entire hospital system. There are the kinds of use cases that we are actually working with healthcare systems today. Or think about a connected ambulance where you have a public safety professional onboard. [C-Band connectivity is] able to provide assistive technologies like visual HoloLens technology to allow ER doctors to support that onboard diagnostic and care.
I’ve been following Verizon’s work with the Department of Defense (DoD) somewhat closely and I know you’ve won several contracts with the agency. What can you tell me about the sort of applications that the military and government is tapping Verizon for?
It actually ties into some of the things we already discussed because we’ve been doing some innovation [for the VA with] remote healthcare, telehealth and leveraging the promise of 5G to support clinical settings. At Miramar, we also have been working on use cases where we can, again, go mobile. Being able to provide advanced mobile tactical environments where there may not be good cellular coverage.
We are also securing the flight line with things like proactive maintenance, where we can anticipate problems on inboard aircrafts before they even land to make sure you have the proper equipment on hand. You can imagine that in hostile settings how important it is to turn aircrafts around quickly. This also has commercial applications. We are very excited about the use cases that we are working on with the DoD because we do see immediate applicability into the commercial settings, and so there is a great alignment there.
Lastly, we see that it’s really important for the U.S. to remain innovative, and so partnering with the DoD very closely on the R&D efforts helps ensure that we don’t create a gap between what other parts of the world are able to do and what we’re able to do.
It’s hard for me to talk about these types of use cases that involve people’s safety and access to healthcare without thinking about our country’s digital divide. As this support for healthcare and other frontline workers broadens and improves thanks to C-Band and other deployments, how is Verizon making sure communities aren’t being left behind?
It’s a good question and something that Verizon has been committed to for years. I’ll start by saying that there are broadband availability deficits even in our most dense urban centers. Whether we think about those dense urban centers or we think about some of the most remote locations in the country, and many of those being tribal lands, we think about the importance of being able to ensure a couple of things: availability, making sure that we have given sufficient availability of those services; digital literacy because it’s one thing to deploy, but they must also understand how to use it; and affordability.
In urban areas, there has been recent work done on the multi-tenet unit challenges around getting access into these buildings. A landlord might not give free access to multiple providers to get into that building. So while you might have the challenge in a remote area of running a network down a three-mile dirt road, in an urban center it can be just as challenging if you can’t run the conduit from a manhole in the street through the building.
[The digital divide] really is a multi-faceted problem where everybody needs to be leaning in and committing to this mission of providing access, education and making it affordable. We are working closely with our cities, states and federal agencies to make sure we are putting our assets where they can serve the most people.
