ORLANDO, Fla. – Verizon Communications CTO Tony Melone shared his outlook for his company and the industry at this year’s GenBand Perspectives conference. He said Verizon Wireless’ LTE footprint will match its 3G footprint by year’s end, and that the carrier’s LTE network now reaches more than 90% of the U.S. population.
As for voice over LTE, Melone said Verizon will be “aggressive but smart. We’re not going to roll it out before it’s ready. Building a nationwide VoIP network in a radio environment is not trivial and when we do it we want to make sure it meets the same high quality standards as our current voice network. You’ll see that roll out at the end of this year or early next year. We’ll be network-ready this year. How we decide to roll it out is still being decided within our marketing organization.”
Verizon Wireless noted last year that VoLTE was still working through some challenges, including consistent call quality, that prevented the carrier from rolling out services.
Melone also said that Verizon Wireless is achieving data speeds that are higher than those it publicizes. “We advertise 5 to 12 [megabits per second],” he said. “That’s what we engineer for on our loaded network. We’re achieving speeds much greater than that today. As an industry Verizon has really led the efforts here and as a result our competitors – AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile – they’re all pushing ahead as well and as a result 4G here in the [United States] is far superior to anywhere in the world. That was not the case with 3G so we believe our leadership helped with all that in the [United States].”
Verizon Wireless’ determination to deliver LTE and all it has to offer could require more spectrum. Melone said that Verizon Wireless will be able to re-farm some 3G spectrum for LTE, but that the company is determined to acquire more spectrum if needed. “Our aggressiveness has allowed us to change this industry, and we’re going to continue to be aggressive, we’re going to continue to meet our customers needs and demands and if that means we need to go out and get more spectrum, that’s exactly what we’re going to do,” he said.
The U.S. government recently required Verizon Wireless to sell some of its licenses in order to acquire spectrum in the 1.7/2.1 GHz band, in an effort to reduce the concentration of spectrum with one company. Melone said government efforts to restrict Verizon Wireless’ bandwidth purchases ignore one important fact: “We’re putting that spectrum to use. We’re spending $16 billion a year to build that spectrum. I could understand their argument if we were buying it and putting it on the shelf.”
Verizon Wireless is currently using its 700 MHz spectrum assets to support its LTE service, with plans to add 1.7/2.1 GHz spectrum to provide depth to the network in high-traffic markets.
Melone said network densification will also help deliver the promise of LTE, and that small cells will be particularly important. “Some people at Qualcomm think there is going to be a cell in everybody’s home that could actually permeate out and serve the external community as well,” he said.
Verizon Communications’ FiOS fiber-to-the-home network is also a very important initiative for the company. “We’ve really driven that technology to the point now where our service offers 300 Mbps to consumers and we definitely see, in the not-too-distant future, being able to provide customers with a gigabit per second to their home if they need it. Quite frankly some of us question what could happen in the home to require that.”
But Melone was quick to note that engineers are not always the best at envisioning how consumers and businesses will use technology. “As technologists, we’re probably underestimating what the future will be and how technology will shape that future,” he said.
