Telecom industry Product Development at Verizon - CXOTalk 702

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We're discussing telecom, product  development, and 5G with Nicki Palmer,   Chief Product Development Officer at Verizon. The assets we have are amazing, so to be able   to sit in this role and say, "Wow! I've  got the best wireless network in the world.   I've got a capital budget of $18 billion or  so a year that continues with that network   investment to ensure that it's the best. I've  got fiber infrastructure that supplies it all   and a wonderful, loyal customer base." You're looking at these assets and,   in some ways, it's like a kid in a candy shop.  Now, our job is, how do you connect them in  

different and unique ways with the advent of new  services and new technologies that just continue   to come upon us to serve customers? Honestly, it just starts with our people.   I will tell you that we truly have the best  engineers and technologists in the business.   Our credo at Verizon says that bigness  is not our strength. Being big isn't,   but being best is, and best starts with people. I'll go back just to the pandemic for a minute.  

It's affected us all, certainly. It's hard to  talk about it in positive terms, sometimes,   without acknowledging the people that have  fallen ill and been victim to COVID-19,   all the people that have lost their jobs,  and the dramatic impact it's had on society.  During the pandemic, our first responsibility  was to our employees (their safety   and their health). Doing that and ensuring that we  had a way of quick, open, and honest communication   and just amazing programs to stay connected,  that became really the number one priority.  I'll tell you. I've never been prouder.  I've been in the business and been with  

this company for 31 years now. I've never been  more proud than during this pandemic to see   how our leadership, our CEO Hans, and our Chief  Human Resources Officer Christy Pambianchi   just rose to the challenge. We had daily meetings  at noon every day to ensure rapid communication.  I could go on and on, but here's what I will tell  you. Forbes recognized Verizon as the number one   pandemic response company in their list of top  100 companies. I think that speaks volumes.  When I go to, "How do you manage all this?"  it comes back to people, respecting people,   ensuring their safety, communicating  openly and honestly with them   in times of dramatic uncertainty and,  certainly, unprecedented times is job one. 

How do you spend your time? Where  is the bulk of your time spent?  I actually am pretty diligent about keeping  track of my time. I learned early in my career   that it's the only thing that you can really  control is how you spend your time. You've   only got 24 hours in a day and there's  always things to balance among home and   all the things that we love to do and work. In my work life, I will tell you; people are   sometimes surprised. I spend an inordinate amount  of my time with the organization, with frontline.  During this pandemic, it became quickly apparent  that connecting with people, not just my direct   reports, not just Hans and the senior team or my  peers, but the frontline employees. For me, that's   our engineers, that's our technologists, our  coders. Understanding what they're dealing with  

and how we can best support them became paramount. One of the things that I did is we instituted what   we call Walk and Talks, which is a way, number  one, to get out of the house and get the blood   flowing with a little daytime walk, but I dedicate  an hour a day. I usually do this three to four   days a week—I try for five, but three to four is  what usually happens—to do two walk-and-talks,   so a half an hour and a half an hour.  It's only open to frontline employees. 

There is no agenda. We could talk about  the weather. It's been amazing because   some people will come in. They'll  pitch me an idea for a new product.   Others will come in with a list of 20 questions  they want to know. Others want career advice.  It's just a great way to get the pulse  of the organization. Not the only way,   but it's been great. That's just one way I  spend my time, but that's an example of what   I think about leadership and how that's a key  piece that is often underrepresented, I think. 

I also spend a lot of my time with suppliers,  having a close relationship and understand with   our key partners. We do none of this alone. We  have the best network in the world, but that is   also because we have great relationships with  our suppliers, whether it's the large suppliers   like Nokia or Ericsson or, on the device side,  Apple or Samsung or others on the core network   or on the product side where we have many smaller  providers that play a key role. I spend a lot of   time with them because being in sync is a key  part of being agile in delivering products.  It's a matter of employees, external with  suppliers. I spend a good amount of time  

advocating for Verizon and talking externally.  I'm always happy to do that because it's such an   easy story to tell. Of course, I spend my  fair share of time in product reviews and   ensuring that the team is executing on schedule  and on budget with the quality that is required   by our demanding customers. It's a bit of a mix. We have an interesting question that's come   in from Twitter from Andrew Morawski who is a  telecom industry leader. He was the president of   Vodafone in the U.S. and now he's with Oracle.  He asks, "As a tech leader owning such massive  

responsibility, how do you balance  organizational priorities between   legacy products and new products and innovation?" It is very easy to get bogged down in the present.   I think one thing that Verizon  has been really very, very good at   is our planning process, our technology  planning process. We are always thinking ahead.  We've been thinking about 5G for at least five  years now, and probably much longer. We led with   convening a cross-functional,  cross-organizational, across the world   group of people to talk about the standards  for 5G, to set them, and really accelerated   the 5G schedule by a few years. I think  that's generally understood in the industry.  That's just an example of how looking forward  is so important because you have to fight.  

At least, I have to fight the instinct, as  an engineer, to want to go deep on today's   problems. But we lead big organizations. We have excellent leaders, and some of those   leaders are focused on today's problems  or legacy technology and what's the best   thing to do. How do we migrate customers to newer  technology that has more functionality for them,   but do it in a way that is clear to them  and provides a glide path to get there?  I will tell you. I spend most of my  time on looking forward. It's also  

my team's responsibility to be innovative. There  we have a great structure with our 5G labs.   We have six labs in the United States, one over  in London. These are fantastic places where you   can come in and innovate on the 5G network that's  live, on the mobile edge compute live network.  We have entrepreneurs, small companies, large  companies, universities, academics, all come in   and it's a great place to be. It's like a  roll up your sleeves, and get on the network.   Let's not just talk and whiteboard,  but let's develop something. 

There is a structure around innovation. Innovation  is not just sitting back and thinking and waiting   for that apple to fall on your head and the idea  to pop up. There is a process around it. We've   got great structure around that. I will say, to try to summarize,   more of my time is spent looking forward  because we've got just a great engine   on today's technologies and today's  business. We have a very disciplined   capital allocation and planning process,  too, which forces some of these issues. 

We want to go after this next great thing that we  think (consumers or businesses) will solve their   problems and will be a big hit with them. All  right, well, it's got to fit within a capital   window. It sounds like, with $18 billion of  capital, "Wow, you must be able to do everything."   Well, there are still hard decisions to make. Migrating technology, decommissioning the old,   always having an eye towards what is the return  that we're getting on this or how long-lasting   is this technology, understanding the  change in consumer and business needs,   it's a balance. But I think you want to be  looking forward and have a discipline to   force some hard decisions on the existing tech. How close are you to the products? The reason I   ask is because it's clear, given  the scale at which you operate,   that much of your time is spent being an inspiring  leader, developing plans, and so forth. Yet,  

you're a technical person by background. And so,  how close are you to the products themselves?  Before running product development for Verizon,  I was the CTO for Verizon Wireless. When Verizon   Wireless was its own unit, we had very clear  understanding that all the products we launched   we should know how to use (as a leadership team).  This was done to me and then I did it to others.  If we're launching (you name it) Verizon  Cloud—a great product that can help with   consumers in terms of their storage needs  for pictures, contacts, other things—I would   be asked by my CEO, "Have you tried the product?"  I'd pull it up. Here's VZ Cloud. It works great.  It became the culture of the organization  to know our products and use our products.  

That has been around for a long time in  Verizon Wireless. We all bring that with us.  Now, on the business side, it's a little harder to  do sometimes because we are all consumers. We all   have consumer devices, but we're not all CIOs.  We don't all run large organizations and try to   manage a mobile workforce or fleets of vehicles.  It becomes a little bit more challenging.  There, one thing I love to do is sit down with  our customers because they want to tell you how   things work and how things don't work. I think, on  the business side, you have to listen. You have to   read. [Laughter] I don't know any other way  to put it, but you've got to spend the time. 

I tell my kids all the time when they see me  online, reading or preparing in the evenings.   I tell them. I say, you know you have a test  tomorrow and you have to study for that test.   I said, that never goes away. You always have to bone up  

because technology changes so quickly. Customer  needs change so quickly. Certainly, we've seen   that over the past year. It becomes a little more  challenging to be hands-on in the business side,   but there are lots of ways to do that as well. We have a question from Twitter from   Arsalan Khan on this subject of how you work  with your customers. He makes the comment.  

He says, "It seems that Verizon is almost  acting as a consulting firm in some respects   (guiding your clients) because of  the collaborative relationship."  We serve the vast majority of the Fortune 500.  We count them among our valued customers on the   business side. When you look at what they're going  through, it's hard to even talk about it in such   broad terms because it's different in retail,  it's different in manufacturing, it's different in   healthcare or automotive. But we have  those relationships with those customers.   It's our goal to be their trusted advisor  on their digital transformation journey. 

One thing that we've seen during  this pandemic that continues today   is it's sort of catapulted all of our journeys  to digitize and use technology in our workforce.   Whether that was something that we were doing  internally or with our customers, number one,   they see our leadership in 5G. Number two, they  hear things like mobile edge compute and they   think to themselves, "What can that do for me?" We're there to help them. Listen, we do very   consultative work, but it's also a  partnership. We bring them into those   5G labs that I told you about and are able to  develop a very customized proof of concept,   especially early on in new technology. You need to test, you need to showcase a little,  

and you need to educate on what we  call the eight currencies of 5G,   a few of which are ultralow latency and really,  really high bandwidth (in the gigabit per second   speed range). Those things plus the reliability  advantage and the IoT or connectedness advantage,   these are just some of the things that 5G  service provides over 4G or any previous   generation of service (on the mobile side). When a customer hears these things, they say,   "Wow! That sounds great, but how can that help  me?" I think you can't just go in with solution   upon solution without really understanding  what the pain points are. Luckily, we have   a great business working with those customers  – industry by industry, customer by customer.  Then it's my job to be able to say, "Oh, wow!  Here's a great, augmented reality solution that   worked for healthcare." Now, from a platform  perspective, how can I repurpose that to work   in a retail store? That's where our technologists  come in. They're just really fantastic at being  

able to look broadly across the portfolio. You're looking at a combination   of market needs; interesting, innovative  applications; as well as the platform   that enables you to do all this. Tell us about  the platform rather than me tell you. [Laughter]  Our platform starts with our  network. Over the past few years,  

we've undergone a major transformation.  We call it our Intelligent Edge Network.  Back to that wireline and wireless business, we  were able to combine those networks. It starts   with a unified core network and then sort  of evolves out from that in terms of fiber. 

Fiber is what we spend a good piece of our capital  budget on, and it is not wireline or wireless. It   is both. It's multipurpose, multiuse fiber. The more fiber I put in the ground,   the more enterprise customers that I  could connect directly to data centers,   the more consumers I can connect to our  wireless network because those cell sites are   only wireless from the device to the cell site.  After that, it's all fiber. We have wholesale   opportunities and the list goes on and on.  That fiber network is really, really important.  Then we have access technologies that, over  time, we've become sort of access agnostic   to how consumers and businesses want to  get on the network. But that's really  

the base platform. It starts with the network. Then a lot of people like to talk about above the   network. What are the products and services that  happen above the network? I think there you have   to start with MEC (mobile edge compute). There  we've recently launched a partnership with Amazon  

Web Services where we are creating these outposts  (along with our network) that are pushed out   further into the network that enable developers,  to use a platform that they're used to, to now   develop services that could take advantage of 5G  and those currencies of 5G that I talked about.  We've launched – oh, goodness – I think over  ten cities now with our mobile edge compute   platform (along with AWS). We've announced a  partnership with Microsoft for a private MEC.   These partnerships are all part of the platform.  Then, on top of that, you can think of different  

types of services that can get access to that  network and take advantage of those currencies.  One I really love, because we also have just such  a wonderful strength in it, is computer vision.   Computer vision applies to facial recognition when  you're walking into a stadium and people want to   identify you. It applies to a manufacturing floor  where we can look at products and services and do   defect identification better than a human  can, maybe. And so many other things.  Computer vision requires what? It requires an  awful lot of bandwidth. You don't want to be  

transmitting that amount of data too far back into  the core of the network. That's where the mobile   edge comes in and applications like computer  vision, for example, can sit on top of that.  We're developing easy ways for applications to  get access to the network. How do you onboard   devices? How do you diagnose devices? All of  those services are all part of the platform   that we're building for enterprises in our  mobile edge compute world. But also, over time,  

you'll see consumers and some B2B2C applications  coming out of those platforms as well.  Where do the 5G labs fit into this?  You've mentioned 5G labs several times.  The 5G labs are instrumental to all this  because, again, these are the places where   we cannot just think big—along with our customers  and our partners—but we can actually try things.  

We have really developed a very rapid kind  of rinse and repeat cycle on innovation.  You've got an idea. Boom. Let's prototype  it. Let's do that in an inexpensive way.  By the way, all of that network technology that I  talked about and, frankly, our network evolution   to much more heavily software (as opposed to  hardware) is a piece of what drives that agility.   We're able to, in these labs, prototype very,  very quickly. That's part of the magic there.  I'll tell you. During the pandemic, guess what.  No one is in the labs, right? The first thing   that we did—after ensuring the health and safety  of our employees—was to say, how do we continue?   We love these places. Customers love  these places. How do we keep that going? 

Our team was able to rapidly go virtual.  We have a 5G virtual lab, which is very   interesting and engaging. We can meet there  and take customers through the journey   online. We're able to still maintain our  innovation and also maintain our programming,   if you will, that we've done in these 5G labs. For example, we'll set up   a retail summit and we'll invite large retailers  across the board. We'll invite some academics.  

We'll have an in-depth discussion about our new  technologies, what's happening in the industry,   and how they can really aid retailers in  some of the pain points that they have   during the pandemic and ongoing. That's the type of programming and   innovation that is really fueling much of what  we're seeing now with 5G. It's very exciting.  The labs then is almost a kind of bridge  to help you at Verizon understand the real   market needs from your customers and  where they want to see all this go.  Yeah, absolutely. I love to say innovation is  not any one person's job. It's all of our jobs   to think big. Innovation comes  from a variety of places. 

I would say my team is accountable for  technological innovation, so it's amazing   sometimes how, in the mobile world, maybe you  change a bit or a byte or a tiny little setting   and it changes the whole landscape. Not everybody  is going to understand that, so we're accountable   for that, pushing the technology to the limits,  trying things, failing, and moving fast.  Innovation also comes from our customers. There we  have wonderful marketing and customer experience   teams that work hand-in-hand with customers in  all the traditional and nontraditional ways.   Hearing from them is very, very important. Of course, innovation comes also from strategy  

and really taking a step back and saying, "Here's  a market maybe we're not in. Should we be in? What   do we think the future really looks like?" I've got to tell you. I don't think Verizon   is much different than many other  companies. Over this last year,   we've spent a lot of time thinking about those  things because the world has changed so much.  I mentioned digital transformation earlier.  We estimate that most enterprises' digital  

transformation journey has been accelerated by  about five to seven years. I can say that I see   that with customers. I also see it internally. I'll tell you that some of the solutions that we   brought to bear very early in the pandemic  were not new, per se. They were sort of in   the pipeline. But what the pandemic did and what  this dramatic work from home and all the societal   change and unrest that we saw, the value of our  connectivity and our services, it just demanded   that we not wait. I think, more often than not,   we found that we could go even faster. Sometimes I  feel like we're going super-fast, but I know that  

there is always a higher gear. I think it did push  us into saying, "Wow! I've got the solution that   was on the shelf," and, boom, we just did it. The same is true with our own operations. For   example, when all the retail stores were closed,  what do we do? Well, we didn't lay off. We didn't   furlough. We accelerated our capital deployment  and we leaned into deploying the latest network. 

We also took those retail employees and retrained  a number of them, the vast majority of them,   to take calls in a call center.  Now, it's just that agility.  We've been doing, for example, work from  home or home-based agent for a long time   in our call centers, but it wasn't 100%. Now,  all of a sudden, boom, we're 100%. Guess what;   we found ways to make it work. The necessity being the mother of invention,   I do subscribe to that as well. I think the  pandemic and the learn from home, work from home,   this environment just catapulted us all.  There are a lot of learnings from that,  

there are a lot of positives that we can  take even more risk maybe than we thought,   and there's always a higher gear to go faster. How did you drive innovation during a period   of time when there was, number one, so much change  taking place and then, number two, people were not   physically together, and so they had to relearn  how to work together in different ways? In that   kind of situation, how did you drive innovation? Innovation wasn't my first concern (a year ago).   It really goes back to, all right, well, even  your family and then your employees. Are you   safe? Are you healthy? What do we need to do to  secure that? I already talked about what Verizon   did and how we really rose to the challenge there. Then I'll tell you that when it comes to product   development and innovation, we took our 5G labs  and quickly turned them virtual, so that worked.  

We took our product development process, the  details of requirements, agile development,   scrum teams, and all of that. We had  already experience in doing that remotely,   so we do development around the world. We follow the sun. We've got big teams in   India and around the world, so we're used  to doing bits of code, handing that off,   and handing it back. So, a lot of it wasn't  new. It just sort of put it on steroids. 

The development process, I'm pleased to say  that throughout 2020 and through the first   quarter of 2021, we were able to meet  all of our product objectives. I was   (I don't want to say) surprised—I never  bet against the team—but, boy, what a   big accomplishment in the midst of all that was  going on, to meet those objectives, which we did.  Now, we look at, "Well, how do you continue in  this mode?" until we get sort of a hybrid mode   established, which of course we're looking at  (like other companies). I think one of the big   things is, we bought a company about a year  ago, BlueJeans, that does video conferencing.   That has really transformed the  way that we think about integrating   a fantastic video conferencing solution  with other platforms that we have:   our messaging platform, our computer  vision expertise, our XR type of services. 

How do we pull those all together to really  take an excellent platform and make it   that much better? We're all using BlueJeans  inside Verizon. It's great, the way that we   release code so quickly on that platform  and the voice of the customer comes through.   We're leveraging that internally and also  for our customers. That innovation continues. 

I think the theme here, Michael, is that I don't  know that there were a lot of brand new things.   It was about how do you take what you had a good  hunch was going to work and just do it. Again,   the lesson is about, maybe in a more stable  environment, risk-taking and just always the   pressure to move faster and be more agile in  this world with technology moving so quickly.  Again, it's not only 5G. We couldn't be any  more bullish about 5G and how it will usher in,  

literally, the 4th Industrial Revolution. We  believe it's a general-purpose technology that   is going to affect the way we live, work,  and play – consumers and businesses alike.  You think about that with everything else  that's happening, with AIML, with microbiology,   robotics, so many changes in the technical  landscape. When they come all together,   you can't sit still. If you sit still, you're  losing ground. You've got to keep pushing.  You're seeing so many different kinds of  applications, whether it's 5G or these other   technologies. What are some of the things that  excite you that you see coming down the road? 

Sports and entertainment. People are dying to  get back. We're doing a number of things there.  We're testing and actually using something  called ShotTracker that uses sensor-based   technology to transform the game of  basketball and bring the in-person,   in-stadium, in-venue experience to consumers at  home, and fans on their device. That's one thing.  Also in sports, we introduced the first 5G and MEC  application at the last Super Bowl, which was this   mobile game called the NFL Ultra Toss where  you could sit on your device and virtually   toss a football into a virtual truck that sat in  the middle of the field, so multiplayer, in-person   game, which would have been very hard to  do on any other technology. That's done.  Sports will be transformed. The fan experience  will be transformed by these technologies.  Let's go to education, so something a little less  entertainment-focused. Healthcare and education   are two big areas where this technology will  make meaningful inroads for society, I believe.  

In healthcare, for example, we're using 5G to  take a virtual image of a patient's CAT scan   of their brain, overlay it in augmented reality  during surgery, and it leads to better outcomes.  We have a lot of companies and doctors that are  looking at this, so take it from them, not so much   from me. When you're doing brain surgery, I've  learned it's a little bit more art than science.   There are ways that we can use the low latency  and high bandwidth of 5G technology during   surgery—and even leading up to the during surgery  just during training of surgeons—to lead to   better outcomes. That's absolutely happening. In education, we're looking at how 5G can   transform this work and learn from a home  environment. We're taking content. We have a   great partnership with the Smithsonian where we're  taking their existing artifacts and content, fully   digitizing them, turning them into 3D artifacts so  that you can access them in a very engaging way.  Those are just a few examples. I love what  it's going to do for education and healthcare.  

Excited about every other industry too. Let me jump to another question very quickly   from Twitter. How do you work with your  customers' IT departments, especially in areas   like cybersecurity? I'll ask  you to keep it really brief.  You don't ever want to really tout cybersecurity.  I think it's one of those "knock on wood" things. 

We pride ourselves on a secure and reliable  network. Customers come to us because of that.   We form deep partnerships. We just issued a cyber report, in fact,   that our enterprise customers like to look at  to help inform some of their decision-making. 

Cyber is core to who we are. It's not  new news that breaches and scams have   accelerated during the pandemic, so it's even  more important to be thinking about cyber.  We have to be partners with our enterprise  customers. Oftentimes, yes, that is with the   CIOs and their IT departments. But sometimes it's  even at the CEO level or even at the frontline   level. Just like no one is accountable for  innovation—everybody is—the same thing with cyber.  Let's shift gears very much and talk about  diverse teams, diversity in the workplace, and   in STEM. You have a really interesting background  in, obviously, your work. You're a woman in such a  

heavily dominated male field. Tell us about that. For a woman in tech, Verizon has been a very good   place to work. I believe it's because diversity is  in our credo. We embrace it, along with personal   development, not only because it's the right  thing to do but because it's smart business.  It's crucial to our success. Our customer  base is diverse and we have to reflect   diversity in order for the business to succeed. That being said, we know that there's always a   higher gear. We've worked hard to improve  the representation of women and minorities  

in our workforce, especially in tech. We're not  where we want to be, but we've been very open and   transparent. We've issued publicly our diversity  statistics and encourage other companies to do so   because we also believe that you don't  usually improve what you don't measure   and take seriously, so it's very important. Now, I will tell you that, with Verizon,   but also personally, I'm extremely passionate  about getting more women represented in STEM.  

There are a number of things that we do  corporately and that we do in our day-to-day   to encourage women to stay in the workforce. During the pandemic, we know that women left   the workforce at higher rates than men and  they were underrepresented to begin with. Now,   instead of going forward, we've taken a few steps  back. That's a very, very big problem and it's   going to take a lot of us to fix that over time. We know we don't just support women through their   journeys and through their careers. We have to  go deeper. Deeper, to me, starts very young. 

We have to get young girls understanding  that technology and science is part of   their everyday life. When we're cooking  in the kitchen, when we're out gardening,   the technology is a piece of that, so  opening their eyes to the wonders of science.  When girls get in middle school, we know  that is the time that they deflect at a high   number if something becomes uncool about being  into science and math. We've got to stop that.   There are a lot of programs that are aimed to do  that but, at that point, it is extremely critical. 

Verizon has what's called the Innovative Learning  School, Verizon Innovative Learning Schools,   where we're dedicating – oh, goodness. I wish  I knew the number off the top of my head.   I believe it's hundreds of millions of dollars in  order to ensure that we have technology infused   in curriculums in underserved areas and that  women, young girls in tech is a key part of that.  Then as these girls get into high  school, they need role models.   They need to be shown paths. What can you  do with an interest in science and math?  I tell my story often. I kind of looked  into it. My father was an engineer.  

I had a mother that said you could do anything  that you put your mind to and try hard enough.  I followed his footsteps and went to Penn State  just like he did and got an engineering degree   just like he did. So many women in my generation  that had technical degrees have a similar story   because I believe the statistic is about almost  two-thirds of the practicing female engineers have   a father or brother that's a practicing engineer. What does that tell you? That tells you you're   out of luck if you don't have someone  close to you that can sort of show you   what to do with your interest and your abilities. One thing I'd like to say and to your audience  

also is that you don't have to be an engineer.  You don't have to be a woman in order to encourage   this. We can all do more throughout that path with  our children, with our neighbors' children, with   our schools in order to encourage that type of  growth participation because it will be a shame.  We cannot look at this 4th Industrial  Revolution and only have half the population   participating in its development, its execution,  and how it grows. We need everybody. We need a  

full, diverse set of views on this. We're already seeing   different types of bias erupting in algorithms.  That's also a well-known phenomenon when it comes   to AI. We need everybody's brainpower on this and  we need diversity in order to really be successful   and reach the full potential of everything  that this technology promises in the future. 

On that topic, we have one last question from  Twitter, a great question from Constance Woodson   who asks, "Will Verizon 5G's partnership with the  new infrastructure plan in any way help bridge   the digital divide in underserved communities?" Verizon has been committed to this for a long   time, and we've just renewed our commitment.  When you look at our social responsibility   goals, bridging the digital divide is top of  the list. That is because it's what we do.  We feel that connectivity should be  affordable and it should be accessible.   That's why we are building the network as  broadly as we can, as quickly as we can.   That's why we have initiatives like Verizon  Innovative Learning Schools that provide the   latest technology to underserved schools. That's why we are frankly the largest rural  

provider of mobile services right now. I  think a lot of people don't know that. But   when you think of rural America, Verizon is the  largest provider of service in rural America.  I didn't mention the C-band auction, but if  you follow us at all, you just know that we   were very successful in securing wonderful  C-band spectrum that will serve this company   and consumers and businesses for years to come.  Long after I'm gone from Verizon, you will see   that investment paying dividends because spectrum  is the basic building block of wireless service   and we've always been great stewards of spectrum. This was a big moment for Verizon and it's   part of how we will provide  service and continue to provide   the best service to inner cities and to rural  America alike. We are very committed to this.  Thank you for the question, Constance. All right. Nicki Palmer, Chief Product Development  

Officer at Verizon, thank you so much for  taking the time to talk with us and share your   thoughts and your views with us today. It's really been a pleasure.   Thank you so much, Michael. Everybody, thank you for watching. Before you go,   please subscribe to our YouTube channel and hit  the subscribe button at the top of our website.   A huge thanks to Nicki Palmer of Verizon and  especially to all the people who contributed   and asked such excellent questions today. Check out CXOTalk.com. We have great shows  

coming up, and we'll see you again next week.  Thanks so much, everybody. Take care. Bye-bye.

2021-04-26

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