Wave: I’d like to talk about the education campaign in a moment, but first: Verizon Wireless certainly made a big splash with its open access announcement back in November. Why did you decide to open your network to outside applications and devices after expressing concerns about having to do so in the 700 MHz spectrum?
Mr. McAdam: Our decision to open our network was market-driven – it’s all about giving our customers more choices. We listen very closely to what our customers are telling us about what they want, and we truly believe some of our customers want another option – another way of connecting our network. We believe our move will dramatically accelerate the innovation that’s already occurring, and this will prove to be a transformative moment in the wireless industry. As we said in our announcement, there will be safeguards. The devices will have to meet minimal technical standards for connectivity, to make sure they will actually work on our network. There are still details to be worked out, such as pricing and plans, but we want consumers to know we’re listening to them and making decisions based on what we’re hearing.
Wave: However, you still have some concerns about the 700 MHz rules?
Mr. McAdam: We believe that any solution or offering – including Open Access – should be market-driven, not government driven. Case in point: the FCC’s C-block ‘open access’ rules. We have two primary complaints: I think as an industry, we need to be really careful not to let everybody else defi ne what open access means. The FCC’s version of open access has price regulation and some aspects of net neutrality in it, and they would actually roll back the clock from our perspective on what intelligence can be put in the network. The Commission said very clearly that all the intelligence needs to be in the device and basically the network needs to be a dumb pipe.
Well, that’s not how we built the network in the US, not across Verizon Wireless or
across many of the carriers. I think that if you go into the C-block not understanding what you’re signing up for, you can get into trouble. We don’t think that there is anything in the record that shows a failure in pricing or a failure in networks and how they’re managed, and so this heavy-handed regulation is the wrong way to go. That’s why we challenged the rules.
"Our decision to open our network is all about giving our customers more choices. We listen very closely to what our customers are telling us about what they want, and we truly believe some of our customers want another option of wireless service."
Lowell C. McAdam
President & CEO of Verizon Wireless