Unlimited video streaming is unlikely to be in wireless carriers’ interest, Verizon Wireless President and Chief Executive Officer Denny Strigl told a New York audience, but the company still believes that a significant portion of its future revenues will come from data services.
“I think that the key going forward is not only adding new customers and deepening penetration in the U.S., it’s … mining the customer base that we already have,” Strigl said during the Goldman Sachs Communacopia conference. “This is where your growth comes from in the future.”
Verizon Wireless customers, he said, send and receive about 4 billion text messages and 100 million picture messages per month. The company also is seeing increasing penetration of data services among enterprise customers.
Strigl said that in spite of Wall Street naysayers who expect growth within the wireless industry to slow as penetration increases, the likelihood that people will carry multiple devices will help sustain growth.
Strigl said that Verizon Wireless’ participation in the advanced wireless services spectrum auction will ensure that its has sufficient network capacity going forward, but that the network as it stands today was built to handle applications such as e-mail, not the unlimited use of high-bandwidth services such as video streaming.
“For some applications, like video streaming, it is clearly not in a carrier’s interest to have an unlimited service. It isn’t going to work,” Strigl said. Still, Strigl did note that Verizon Wireless expects to roll out Qualcomm Inc.’s MediaFlo mobile television service early next year-which is also the general timeframe when the carrier has said that it will begin upgrading its CDMA2000 1x EV-DO Revision 0 network with Rev. A upgrades.
Beyond 3G, however, Strigl said that Verizon Wireless’ position on 4G technology is that “4G has yet to be defined” and the company was not going to jump the gun on making a decision. “We think that we have options-whether they are EV-DO Rev. C, [Long Term Evolution] or WiMAX-those are all things that we need to seriously consider,” Strigl said.
