YouSaid · the spoken record

Samantha R. Smith

lines on the record: 89
first: 2025-04-21
most recent: 2025-04-21
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“It at scale. But what we've done is we've virtualized our networks more than any other carrier in the world. So what does that mean? We've put Generic Hardware in our sites and then the equipment providers have to load their software on it. We think that's actually a more powerful tool in mix and match and scaling and lowering cost than sometimes de-standardizing or standardizing these interfaces. But over a period of time, it's important to have more diversity of vendors, have more people play in this space. It's good for us. It's good for the economy. So I think we are very supportive of ORAN. We are part of the alliance. We spend a lot of time, energy, money on R&D and making those interfaces stable. But I feel it has a little more to go before they're standardized and they give you the performance that I get to put it on my network.”
2025-04-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Verizon’s consumer chief: Net neutrality ‘went literally nowhere’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Look, they've built local networks. And do we compete with them? We compete with them at the space. But think about it. We have three full networks, a network that's building up, and then we have competition. This is one of the most competitive markets. And look, OpenRAN is a completely different animal. We should definitely talk on that. Look, over a period of time, OpenRAN is a good thing because it deconstructs the network a little bit. You can have multiple players in a stack. And for folks who are not close to this, today when we buy equipment from a partner, we end up buying almost the whole stack, you know, the head end that goes on to the tower, all the equipment at the bottom of the tower from a single provider. And OpenRAN says, make those interfaces more standardized so that you can mix and match operators more easily. I think philosophically OpenRAN's a good concept. I think more work is needed to get to the performance that makes us comfortable using it.”
2025-04-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Verizon’s consumer chief: Net neutrality ‘went literally nowhere’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, but I'm actually specifically about dish, right? That was five years ago. I think July, June, July of 2020, that deal was completed. They had access to T-Mobile's network for seven years. We're coming at the end of that. They are supposed to have a next generation open RAN 5G network that is a national competitor to you by now. Do you think they have a national competitive open RAN network that causes you to lose any sleep?”
2025-04-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Verizon’s consumer chief: Net neutrality ‘went literally nowhere’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We have three large wireless carriers in a very, very competitive market. We have Dish with its boost network that is competitive in the prepaid space. They're a pretty large player in the prepaid space. They're starting to build post-paid. And then you have the cable companies today, Comcast and Charter and Cox actually all offer wireless services at really competitive prices. In fact, in many cases, the first line is free and their average ARPU is significantly lower than ours. So it is one of the most competitive telco markets in the world today. Three full players, a fourth facility player who is building up, and then a cable who has 100% coverage of the country, who's able to offer wireless. So it's a very competitive market that we have in this space right now.”
2025-04-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Verizon’s consumer chief: Net neutrality ‘went literally nowhere’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I want to wrap up by asking you about a very silly thing from the first Trump administration. In the first Trump administration, T-Mobile bought Sprint. At the time, that set of players in the Trump won concocted a deal where Sprint would sell some assets to Dish Network and we would invest in a thing called OpenRAN to get away from Huawei and have more competition at the tower level. These are all good ideas in theory. Have you spent one minute thinking about the competition posed by Dish Network?”
2025-04-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Verizon’s consumer chief: Net neutrality ‘went literally nowhere’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Look, this is not the first deal we've taken through administrations. We work with Democrats, we work with Republicans, we work with both sets of the administration, we've had good success working with both of them in that piece. Every time we take a deal through, there are trade-offs that have to be made. When we bought track phone, we had trade-offs we had to make with California that were probably not perfect for us as well. So I do think there are trade-offs that need to be made in any large transaction. But at the end of the day, you have to follow the rule of the land. I think that's the more important thing. And we've got to manage the stakeholders. And that's pretty much all we're going to do here.”
2025-04-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Verizon’s consumer chief: Net neutrality ‘went literally nowhere’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You put this in your decision matrix when you look at an administration that shows up and says, We're going to start meddling with your deals from an agency that traditionally has not done this specific kind of meddling into how you hire and fire. How do you think about that decision in your two by two matrix?”
2025-04-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Verizon’s consumer chief: Net neutrality ‘went literally nowhere’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We don't know. We're going to work constructively with them to follow rules that are needed. But at the end of the day, look, our role is to our stakeholders that we have. My stakeholders are my shareholders, my customers, my employees and society at large. We have to manage and we are going to deliver for those stakeholders what's needed for us. And we will do whatever is needed with the administration to deliver to all the stakeholders. It's a balance when you run a large company our size. You have to balance the different stakeholders. And we will balance those stakeholders. We've done it extremely well in the last 25 years that we've been Verizon. And we'll continue to do that going forward.”
2025-04-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Verizon’s consumer chief: Net neutrality ‘went literally nowhere’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I want to be very clear, very explicit about this when the government passed net neutrality rules, it wasn't, we have to follow the rules of the land. It was we're going to file lawsuits for a decade to get out of these rules because we think they're dumb. And in this case, you're saying Brendan Carr, who has been openly censorious, openly chilling of speech, openly hostile to companies because they have diversity initiatives, you're saying you just have to follow his rules.”
2025-04-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Verizon’s consumer chief: Net neutrality ‘went literally nowhere’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Look, we are still working with the FCC on what the rules are, how we develop the rules, how we've executed the rules on that. It's a work in progress right now, so we are still working through that. But look at the end of the day, we're going to have to follow the rules of the land. We did that before, we've done that, we're going to do that after that. So this is just one of those pieces. We're going to have to follow the rules that's there.”
2025-04-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Verizon’s consumer chief: Net neutrality ‘went literally nowhere’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Literally, just a few days before we're talking, I think T Mobile closed the deal to do a JV on some fiber initiative. But to get there, they had to delete the word diversity from a bunch of its web pages. Is that the level of meddling that you're willing to accept?”
2025-04-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Verizon’s consumer chief: Net neutrality ‘went literally nowhere’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Look, it goes back to the rule and regulations that the administration puts in place. They have certain rules. They work through it. And we have to follow the rules of the way it lays itself out. So that's all we're going to work towards is a constructive dialogue with Commissioner Carr and Chairman Carr on that piece. And we'll continue to deliver that. But at the end of the day, I want the best talent pool for my company. I will do anything that is needed to get the best operators, the best marketeers, the best network operators in the world for Verizon to do that piece. I'm walking away from that. I'm going to follow that. In the process, I have to follow rules and regulations, we'll do that. And if there's some changes that have to be made, we will make those changes. But let's not forget.”
2025-04-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Verizon’s consumer chief: Net neutrality ‘went literally nowhere’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Look, I think one for Verizon, that couple of things internally as a company for us, there are certain things that are non-negotiables for us. How we treat human beings, human dignity, and ensuring that we have the best talent pool when we build and operate the largest consumer telco company in the world. We ain't walking away from that. I think that's there. And then we have to follow rules and regulations of the land, and we will work constructively. We have a constructive dialogue with the FCC to ensure that we follow the rules and regulations of the land. And that's exactly the piece we are in right now with them. And we got the letter from them. We are working closely with the staffers out there. And whatever the letter of the rule, both regulations, rule of the land is, we'll follow that.”
2025-04-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Verizon’s consumer chief: Net neutrality ‘went literally nowhere’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You live in a different regulatory environment now. You have Brendan Carr, who's the chair of the FCC. I'm not a fan of Brendan Carr. I think he's wielding his power irresponsibly, and he knows that I think that. You mentioned earlier your deal with Frontier. That's going to go through, and Brendan has been very clear that he will not allow these deals to go through unless you get rid of all your diversity initiatives. And he says there's an investigation against Verizon on these initiatives. That feels like straight coercion. Like if Verizon wants to go body up and file lawsuits against the FCC imposing regulatory requirements, this would be where you do it. Are you going to fight that fight? Are you going to roll over?”
2025-04-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Verizon’s consumer chief: Net neutrality ‘went literally nowhere’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At the end of the day, if you make good content, customers want it, they'll peer and you'll get access to it. If you make poor content that nobody wants to watch, nobody's going to watch it, irrespective of all the net neutrality so-called rules you have. So I think that was the perfect example of it had nothing to do with size. It just had to do with the fact that they were chasing something that made no sense at that point. And he was the first to admit it. So he could focus his efforts on putting on new shows. By the way, I like the new show, The Residence, by the way. It's a good show.”
2025-04-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Verizon’s consumer chief: Net neutrality ‘went literally nowhere’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I know, but I think he's doing that. He probably said that to cover up something. We made a big do about nothing. In the end, it didn't change anything. If customers want Netflix, they'll get Netflix. We make shitty content. No one's going to watch them. I think it's the core of that issue. So he very soon realized, I remember that conference, and he realized this was a fight about nothing.”
2025-04-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Verizon’s consumer chief: Net neutrality ‘went literally nowhere’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And all that indicated to me was they needed the rule, they needed the fight when they were small to preserve the access. And then they got so big that they didn't need the rule to give them access because they were so big that taking access away would be a problem. That's the competitive playing field that I think you want at the application layer as well. It's really hard for people to perceive.”
2025-04-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Verizon’s consumer chief: Net neutrality ‘went literally nowhere’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, again, I want to be clear that it's the law in New York, it's the law in California. It was the law at the federal level, and it was rolled back. So it did go somewhere at one point. And the most instructive thing I ever heard about net neutrality, it was just the arc that Netflix went on. Netflix was once the loudest proponent of these rules. And then several years later, I saw Reed Hastings at the Code Conference. And he said, I believe it was to Peter Kafka. He said, oh, we don't need to have this fight anymore because we're big and we're so big it doesn't matter”
2025-04-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Verizon’s consumer chief: Net neutrality ‘went literally nowhere’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They are congested because they chose not to peer with me. And they chose not to peer with me because they didn't want to pay the $3 or 3 cents it needed to go and get a port in a particular porting hotel that was needed. So I think the network is a very complex thing. It's not a single pipe that starts at one end and ends at the other end. There are a lot of different interfaces and other things. So I think this whole concept that you're going to unfairly manage someone's network or give someone an unfair advantage. I actually think it doesn't work in reality that way. The second is an economic incentive piece. Look, in the case of AT&T, again, I'm being an academic here, which is they bought Max or whatever it was called back then. And they were willing to give up their dollars. Because the network costs something. They were able to give that up to drive sales of content. That's a decision they made. In the end, it didn't work out that well because it didn't matter. So I think there's economic incentives in place to manage all of this.”
2025-04-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Verizon’s consumer chief: Net neutrality ‘went literally nowhere’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What good did it do to ATT or to any customer on that scenario? Look, I don't know what ATT did. At the end of the day, I don't think a lot of these folks understand how networks work. Because at the core of the thesis, networks is a very complex set of technologies that you have. You have the access network, you have code, you have peering points, you have the backbone of the network. So congestion can happen anywhere in the network. And for example, if someone doesn't come and peer with me, They're going to get congested, but it has nothing to do with me.”
2025-04-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Verizon’s consumer chief: Net neutrality ‘went literally nowhere’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, to be clear, it did get traction. It passed the FCC under Title II. In one administration, it was undone by another administration. And I've never encountered a net neutrality rule at the federal or state level that hasn't allowed for reasonable network management practices, right? That's always the heart of the rule. It's really can you preference some content and services over another, right? No blocking, no throttling is the heart of the rules in Verizon has fought against those. Yeah, but I did have seen your competitors do things like sponsored data, right? So I'll let you off the hook for one second. AT&T, when they owned Max, accepted Max from their own data caps, which is just sort of openly unfair, right? It's just straightforwardly unfair that using Netflix would cost a customer money and using AT&T's owned and operated service would not. And that was an advantage the AT&T wanted to give to Max at that time. And that is the sort of thing that isn't a firefighter on the road, that isn't one.”
2025-04-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Verizon’s consumer chief: Net neutrality ‘went literally nowhere’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Using a congested road. And if a firefighter needs to go through, people are going to move aside and going to let him go through. That's all we are saying. For traffic management purposes, we need to have some controls in the network. Otherwise, in New York City, when the traffic core or the emergency services want access, it's congested. I'm going to have to move people off so they get priority service. That's all it is. And we need traffic management tools. Or you have one person in your town who's sucking up all the bandwidth. And we have places like that where they use 100, 200 times the average bandwidth. And because of that, 99% of the people are getting a shitty experience. We got to manage that traffic. That's all we are saying about it. I think this was a little bit of drama about nothing. And at the end of the day, we want to build networks and we want people to use it. We just want the ability to manage network management in a way that's good for the broad set of people. I don't think we really care about...”
2025-04-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Verizon’s consumer chief: Net neutrality ‘went literally nowhere’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What net neutrality does? I've been in this business for a little north of 20 years before that I was in college having fun and I still don't know what problem we are trying to solve with net neutrality. I actually don't understand that because at the end of the day if Are 300 people”
2025-04-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Verizon’s consumer chief: Net neutrality ‘went literally nowhere’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Verizon fights the hardest against any net neutrality rules that appear at the state level, at the federal level. We can set a watch by the Verizon lawsuit against those rules. It happens every time. You're saying you don't need those rules, right? Like if you, if I'm listening to you correctly, you're saying we've learned our lesson. We're not going to monkey with the network. We're not going to prioritize our own services or someone else's services. We just want volume, right? Pure volume is what will drive your growth. Why fight against the rules if you've already come to the same conclusion?”
2025-04-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Verizon’s consumer chief: Net neutrality ‘went literally nowhere’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was something we should not have done, but it was still a rounding error for us. At the end of the day, we are focused on our. Tends to be mobility. Is fiber Accorders cloud slash AI. Enabling those things. That's it. Those are the only three businesses we are in right now. Carriers around the world have kind of sort of come to a Similar place right now. Probably, I would say, the most focused of carriers anywhere in the world right now.”
2025-04-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Verizon’s consumer chief: Net neutrality ‘went literally nowhere’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Industry. Look at the end of the day, you can either grow horizontally or you can go vertically. There are only two ways to grow. Through a phase, and look Leadership team of Yahoo and AOL, I was sent from Verizon to help run those assets and eventually sell them Of the thesis We create data in the telco. Whether it's Clickstream data, location data, other network data, that if matched with online data could create a better targeting engine for advertisers. That was our thesis going in. The way, but then we Realize that customers trust us because we don't share data A deep, insightful conversation we had within ourselves, and we realized they should not be in a business variant. So we sold that business. But again, for a company our size, If you look at our enterprise value, it was still a rounding error for us.”
2025-04-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Verizon’s consumer chief: Net neutrality ‘went literally nowhere’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To a strategy which is single network, scaled net Much traffic on it as people can, and we'll find ways to monetize it in a pricing construct that we do that. On top of that, we have adjacencies. We have six categories we sell into Use our scale distribution, some integration back with our network to make it real to do that. So I think. We are probably the largest incubator in the world today because we work closely with companies for them to go. Innovate services. So it's a pretty cool position to be in. And as we finished deploying 5G, you'll start seeing more and more of those cool services come out.”
2025-04-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Verizon’s consumer chief: Net neutrality ‘went literally nowhere’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Decided We want to build our non connectivity. I mean, my non connectivity business Almost $15 billion. It's a size of Hilton Hotels, my non connectivity business. If it's a standalone company, The best in the world to do that. I partner with Netflix, I partner with Disney. Insurance protection product inside that we partner with other folks to do that piece. I think To use Distribution Ability to scale subscriptions. To lower cost of acquisition Partner with the best More people use my network, the more excited I get. So Very closely with Likes To ensure that. Use our network more to develop more services. Will monetize it at the network layer really well and then. Top of the network, we'll find adjacencies to sell in. Don't use my network more. All the cool services I build ain't going to matter much. So I think we've”
2025-04-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Verizon’s consumer chief: Net neutrality ‘went literally nowhere’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We give great savings. We give you a 40% discount when you buy Disney or Netflix, Max or all the cool services from us. But the core phone service as you know it has really not gone up in price. And we've delivered more than pretty much any other industry for the price point that we do. And I'm very, very comfortable with that equation. And it's my job as the CEO of the business to ensure that we give more to our customers. Satellite messaging is one. It's something we found a way. We made it work and we included it in our plans. You pay zero for it. So I think we are adding significant value to customers, which is why our churn is so low. People can move wireless easily, but because of the value we bring to them every single day, they like and they stay with us.”
2025-04-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Verizon’s consumer chief: Net neutrality ‘went literally nowhere’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That the plans did I actually didn't. If you see phone price, phone RP average revenue per user, which is every carrier reports it in some form or the other, ARPU has moved very little on a per phone line basis in the last 20 years that I've been in the space. And you're getting a lot more now than you got many years ago. So I think people have this notion their phone bill is going up, but the phone bill is going up because they're signing up for new services. For example, in my case, we're going to have a $2 billion business selling streaming services and entertainment services.”
2025-04-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Verizon’s consumer chief: Net neutrality ‘went literally nowhere’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think most consumers saw 5G as something that just sort of happened to them, right? They upgraded the phone, the network is there. And then I hear you on negative inflation and value over time. But the main thing that happened is you upgrade your iPhone. Now it's 5G capable. You need a 5G plan. And that cost more than the plan you had yesterday. That is not.”
2025-04-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Verizon’s consumer chief: Net neutrality ‘went literally nowhere’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We may be in the last generation of form factor as we know it right now. I think you're going to see a lot more control of the phones using LLM models. I think it will have huge implications on the operating system, huge implications on the app store. But I think this may be the last generation of smartphones that we see. And to power all of the other things, we just need a better network. The second thing is we're doing a lot more work on 5G in the industrial space. You know, it's not something you and I end up using a lot, but in my old job we used to do a lot, private networks, low latency networks, running robotics of robotics and factory automation based on wireless network. There's a lot more space happening in that space. When you roll out such transformational technologies, you got to play the long game. And look, Verizon is a company. We are committed to America. Look, we don't do business in other parts of the world except small business. We are committed to America.”
2025-04-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Verizon’s consumer chief: Net neutrality ‘went literally nowhere’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Whole thing exploded. I think a lot of these kind of special cases and new applications that we are working on tend to be like that as well. It takes a while to work it. Look, I don't think autonomous cars or robotic surgery are going to be the ones that are going to break the bank or are going to be the breakthrough services. But I see new form factors emerging. I think the phone as we know it.”
2025-04-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Verizon’s consumer chief: Net neutrality ‘went literally nowhere’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You were paying more for that than you're paying today when you get a 5G phone with unlimited data, unlimited tech, satellite messaging included. So there are very few categories. In fact, the only other category I can think which has had negative inflation over the last 15 years is TV's, you know, flat screen TVs have really crashed in prices. So TVs and us are probably the two biggest categories that have gone up. Everything else prices gone up significantly all the way from eggs, others everything has gone up. Our prices have actually come down for what we provide there. So I think the industry is probably one of the most unique industries where we tend to give you a lot more for the same amount or a little less than we did two, three, five, ten years ago to do that. The second thing is technology is interesting. You know, for decades nothing happens and then in months, decades happen. You saw that with AI, right? You and I have been listening to AI ever since we were in college. And then suddenly two years or year and a half ago, the”
2025-04-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Verizon’s consumer chief: Net neutrality ‘went literally nowhere’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Wireless is one of the categories that has had negative inflation over the last 15 years. Think about it. When you had 300 minutes on your phone, you were allowed evening and nights were free. Remember the time when you got maybe 300 text”
2025-04-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Verizon’s consumer chief: Net neutrality ‘went literally nowhere’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Great at the concert or the football game to have millimeter wave serving everyone really fast. I agree that that's a great use case. But it actually didn't pan out that this big set of applications we were promised to justify this enormous cost and all of this literal war hype, it never came to pass.”
2025-04-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Verizon’s consumer chief: Net neutrality ‘went literally nowhere’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I sat in all the demos of all the hyped 5G applications, I went on so many self-driving car rides at CES powered by 5G with the data center somewhere that was driving the car for me because the latency was low. I heard a lot about robot surgery, like an infinity amount about robot surgery. Those were the applications that were promised, right? That was the vision of the war, that if we lose the war, China will own this set of industries that is built on the new network. It was not about network capacity in COVID, right? No one was foreseeing that what we would need is a more efficiently run network. It was not really about bringing prices down in any substantial way because the only thing that ever happens is prices go up. That's the spread, right? I'm just wondering, do you see the gap in how much hype there was for 5G and how oversold it was and the consumer reality of it, which is, yeah, everyone's phones might have a little more network capacity? Yes, it's...”
2025-04-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Verizon’s consumer chief: Net neutrality ‘went literally nowhere’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In a few years, right now, probably 50 to 60 million homes could potentially get that. It's another comparator to broadband. And what has happened is because of that, cable has not been able to raise prices. And so it's a lot more beneficial to customers because they have another competitor in spaces to do that. The third thing which I think has been a little underwhelming for me personally is new products and services using some of the 5G capabilities. And you never get this right because you got to get the network, the handset, and the apps all perfectly aligned. I don't think that happened very well on 5G. So I think the third leg of the tool still has more work to do. I think a lot of the AR, VR type new form factors that we are seeing is going to require really low latency that will require 5G. You definitely can't do it on 4G. So sitting where I am, I'm so happy we did 5G. I wish we had done it two years earlier, but that's always the scenario. And look, we'll keep building our network, adding more capacity.”
2025-04-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Verizon’s consumer chief: Net neutrality ‘went literally nowhere’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You put it in the air, the cost went down significantly. You saw 30 40% reduction in cost per bit when you moved from 4G to 5G. Without 5G, you could not have done that. The second is we created a whole business around 50G.”
2025-04-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Verizon’s consumer chief: Net neutrality ‘went literally nowhere’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you stuck with just LTE, we would not be able to take care of the capacity that's happened. Think about it, the pandemic happened. We all moved to work from home. People, we were able to take care of those networks immediately because we had 5G, we could scale up. So 5G adds capacity in a way 4G could never have added because it comes down to spectral efficiency to do that. And we also ended up adding, look at the end of the day, capacity is a very simple thing. You can either add more spectrum, which is expensive, but you can add it. We do it every X years. We do that. Or you can add more cell sites because you can reuse the spectrum. Or you can get spectral efficiency. That's the only three ways to add capacity. And 5G helps with one and three. It puts new spectrum bands into play. And it also helps with spectral efficiency. So you got a lot more capacity out of 5G and also took the cost of capacity down. Every incremental bit that byte,”
2025-04-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Verizon’s consumer chief: Net neutrality ‘went literally nowhere’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Specifically, 5G. Instagram was worth a lot on the LTE network. And most of the 5G networks we have today are running 5G. They're not running on millimeter wave 5G or whatever. They're running on LT Enhance, right? We're still running at the core of the network here in the United States. The hybrid of 4G and 5G.”
2025-04-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Verizon’s consumer chief: Net neutrality ‘went literally nowhere’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So let's talk about what it means to lose the race. I think the first thing is standards. You want a standard that you don't want a bifurcation of standards. And it may happen. It could happen in the chipset, it could happen in AI, it could happen in operating systems and handsets. You're in an interesting phase where you could potentially see a bifurcation of standard between the Western world and China. On 5G, we aligned on a very similar standard, and I think it helped because we were able to take price of the technology down to do that. The second is think of all the applications, the tech economy that you have today, the app ecosystem, the Amazons of the world, the Googles of the world, metas, they rely on the mobility network more than anyone else. I mean, think about Instagram is worth zero without the cell phone and the connectivity. In fact, it's worth zero.”
2025-04-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Verizon’s consumer chief: Net neutrality ‘went literally nowhere’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the network $200 billion between Spectrum and Fiber and the mobility business you have, I don't see any European carrier investing $200 billion in seven years. In fact, they invest a tenth of that they're going to get an award for that. So I think it's super important for a country to be really at the cutting edge of technology, the cutting edge of fiber, cutting edge of 5G. And look, when 6G comes, we will be the first. I'll tell you that today. We were the first in 5G. We beat the Koreans by 12 hours. We will beat whoever else and most likely it's going to be China on 6G as well. So I think it's a national security issue. It's a national competitive issue. We need to keep reinvesting in broadband every single time. And we're not going to stop. You'll see us investing at the same rate for a very, very long time. And all our investment is in America and LA. You know, I'm not investing in other countries. I'm 100% America. And I think the profit.”
2025-04-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Verizon’s consumer chief: Net neutrality ‘went literally nowhere’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, look, I think it's a careful balance. Canada has moved to a local Bulu unbundling scenario as well. UK has always had it. That's why European telecom has one of the lowest investments in telecom ever in any country, almost in any region of the world today, because they just don't have enough of a profit pool and cash flow to reinvest back in their network. I mean, think about 5G. We are going to get to 90% deployment in a country as large and diverse as us. Most European countries are not even at 40, 50% deployment of 5G. So I think one of the things if America wants to be competitive, if America wants to compete with China, having high quality broadband is super important to that, whether it's mobility or whether it's that. And you want to create profit pools in the system to go back and reinvest. I mean, think about it. I'm going to invest close to 18.5 billion dollars of capital, just capital. In the last seven years, we've invested $200 billion.”
2025-04-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Verizon’s consumer chief: Net neutrality ‘went literally nowhere’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, a fire's customer can leave tomorrow morning. Every single FIOS customer today can move to cable broadband that afternoon. Every single FIS, there's very little FIOS customers who don't have a cable competitor in play. I just think FIOS is a better solution. It's a significantly better solution than cable because of the pricing practices they've had and the quality of their network. But there is a full...”
2025-04-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Verizon’s consumer chief: Net neutrality ‘went literally nowhere’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“National carrier that competes with you. So when you say customers stick around for a long time, what I see is well, there's nowhere else to go. How much does that come to your thinking that actually a FIOS customer can't leave?”
2025-04-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Verizon’s consumer chief: Net neutrality ‘went literally nowhere’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Second is we've done a series of price ups over the last couple of years. We've had one in January in price ups. And we know elasticity when we do a price up, we model it. I would say the last price up we did elasticity was a little more than what we had modeled. So that coupled with all the insights we got for the customer, we had to respond and tell the customers that we're going to lock prices for three years. Now it gives customer certainty. It puts a little more pressure back on us because we have to drive revenue other ways. We have clear ways to do that. But I think it's an industry first, especially now. Look, we knew the tariffs were coming in day before yesterday. I mean, it was announced it was on TV. We were very comfortable doing that because at time of uncertainty, we want to give our customers some certainty and some peace of mind.”
2025-04-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Verizon’s consumer chief: Net neutrality ‘went literally nowhere’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Something I don't use. That's one of the reasons why we took out all these inclusions. You get this free, you get that free. And people are like, you know, I know Disney is good. My kids love Disney. But I don't watch Disney. Why should I have to pay for it? So those were the”
2025-04-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Verizon’s consumer chief: Net neutrality ‘went literally nowhere’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Calls transcribe them, put them in a generative AI machine, and at 9 a.m. in the morning I get a sheet of paper that tells me what was the sentiment, key themes, and what happened with all my calls yesterday. It is mind-blowing because earlier I had to call people, we had analysts who used to listen to calls, transcribe them, make notes. Now every single call is put in a machine and I get a piece. We picked up two very clear themes when I did that. The first one for me was certainty. People like, everything in my life is uncertain right now. There's uncertainty about the economy, there's uncertainty about my job, there's uncertainty about work from home, there's just a lot of tension. I want certainty with prices. And especially with categories, I cannot live without. And phone is one of those categories. So certainty was one that kept coming up again and again in our reads from the market. The second thing that came up is flexibility. I never want to pay for...”
2025-04-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Verizon’s consumer chief: Net neutrality ‘went literally nowhere’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Shape. Chern is the number of customers who end up leaving us every single month. It's still very low. It's like.7 or.8. So think about it, like 9% of our customers leave us every year, which means our average customer stays with us for 11 years, which is crazy, by the way. And in FIOS, that number is like close to 20, 30 years, depending on how you look at it. So it's a loyal base, but you want Chern to go down every single time because it's expensive to acquire customers given because we spend a lot of money upfront acquiring them. So for me, it was how do you get churned in a much better place? And we went and asked customers, you know, for the last four quarters, we polled customers. And Nell, I'll give you a great tool that we built with AI where it's an internal tool we built. Every day I get half a million calls coming into my customer care centers every day, every single day it comes in. And we take every one of those calls.”
2025-04-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Verizon’s consumer chief: Net neutrality ‘went literally nowhere’ · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT