Verizon has undergone a major multi-year transformation of its network architecture to provide customers with more capabilities, upgrade the technology in the network, pave the way for personalized customer experiences and provide a platform for enterprises and developers to drive innovation.
“It’s been a tremendously dynamic and exciting few years for our network, introducing 5G to the market, redesigning the network core functions, accelerating our fiber build and introducing a host of advanced technologies to improve our customers’ experience with us,” said Joe Russo, EVP and CEO of Global Network and Technology. “These changes mean more people can do more things in more places more reliably, and that’s what we’re all about as a company.”
A Massive, Multi-Year Network Transformation
Major upgrades to Verizon’s network over the past few years include:
- Introducing 5G service to more than 230 million people, accelerating C-band spectrum deployment and strategically using premium mmWave spectrum to serve customers in high 5G usage areas;
- Expanding 5G Fixed Wireless Access Internet availability to cover more than 40 million households;
- Accelerating the fiber build plan, deploying nearly 57k fiber miles since 2020 and now connecting over 51% of its cell sites with its own fiber;
- Upgrading 76% of pro sports venues with 5G Ultra Wideband service to provide greater coverage and exponentially more capacity in major gathering and event spaces to better support high data traffic; and,
- Redesigning the core of the network to function in a cloud-native environment and introducing advanced technologies such as virtualization, automation and orchestration throughout the network.
These significant changes to the network exponentially increased capacity and performance, created a scalable platform to manage the increase in usage, increased network efficiency, improved security and reliability for customers, and created the platform for exponential growth the company is now seeing.
Better Customer Experience
The massive speed and capacity increases from recent network changes have encouraged customers to use more data and do more in more places than ever before. At present, more than 68% of customers have 5G capable cell phones and they are using exponentially more data. 5G traffic using C-band spectrum makes up more than 38% of the total data on the network, up from over 14% one year ago. As 5G data usage increases, there is a correlated decrease of data volume on the 4G network, with customers currently using just over 56% compared to a year ago.
This shift results in all customers having a better experience – 5G customers are experiencing the speed and massive capacity of 5G, while 4G customers are seeing increases in performance because so much traffic is shifting onto the 5G network freeing up capacity on the 4G network.
Verizon’s Home Internet, Business Internet and Private Networks have altered how, when and where customers access the network. There’s a steady pace of approximately 400,000 net adds for Home Internet each quarter, a majority of which are fixed wireless access (FWA). As of August, over 2.5 million consumer and business customers are using Verizon’s FWA service with each using just over 300 GB of data per month. Private networks are gaining momentum as well with solutions like the Cleveland Clinic and the NFL’s Coach-to-Coach coming online in all 30 NFL stadiums.