Fall 2010 - Northern Virginia Technology Council

Q&A with Bob Johnson, Mike Maiorana, Kyle McSlarrow and J.D. Myers
The emergency response team has more than 25,000 mobile
devices ready for deployment along with everything they need.
And so we’re able to make sure that from a business continuity
perspective, we would be their choice in times of emergency.
KM: There’s no question business continuity is a huge need.
It’s something that we’re very conscious of that we want to and
can deliver.
JDM: Business continuity comes in two different flavors for us.
First is building network redundancy, with no single point of failure
for the customer, to ensure that they’re up and running regardless
of the circumstance.
I talked previously about our 30 percent growth in wholesale,
largely driven by wireless backhaul, where we are building what I
consider seamless bulletproof networks so that when Sprint deploys
these wireless networks in areas where there are disasters — ultimately
that infrastructure, that data, or those wireless voice calls
have to get back to a network. And that’s where we come into play
to bring those signals back once they’ve deployed those networks
so that information can get to where it’s supposed to reach.
MM: Verizon Wireless is no stranger to disaster response and
crisis management. We have a dedicated Crisis Response Team
(CRT), we conduct hundreds of emergency drills each year, and
we have responded to numerous real disasters, not just in this region,
but across the country.
Our network performed extremely well throughout the August
hurricane and our sustained capital investment ensures that our
network has redundancies to provide a framework for reliable service,
even when power is not available. Most of our cell sites and
switches have generator and battery backup. So when power is out,
it doesn’t impact our network or our customers.
Disaster recovery and business continuity depends on two
things: the network and the people. And we are very proud that
when customers need us most, we’re there. When we learned about
the power being completely wiped out in New Kent and King and
Queen Counties in Virginia, our people worked with these counties
to provide immediate support. We quickly deployed our Verizon
Wireless Experience Vehicle outfitted with work stations,
electrical outlets, satellite capabilities for voice and data, voice over
IP, phones and charging stations to help local governments and
displaced citizens during this critical time. Our stores stayed open
for consumers looking for extra batteries and charging adapters.
So both our network and our people delivered.
nvtc Where are your companies focusing for the future?
BJ: First, Sprint has established itself as the differentiated highestvalue-offering
service provider in wireless. We are the only carrier
that continues to offer unlimited data and we have award-winning
customer service and customer experience. We’ve got to continue
to be that highest-value service provider for our customers, building
out our first-to-market wireless 4G network from a national
carrier to ensure that we have the greatest coverage and access for
our customers, both consumer and enterprise.
Transitioning in the 2013 timeframe, we will also continue
to deploy our network vision program, which will give not only
greater coverage, but also help Sprint be more cost competitive
with expected reductions in network operating costs, working
with some of our partners Cox and Comcast on next-generation
back haul capabilities and having less reliance on accessing the
local telecoms for back haul as well.
JDM: From a Cox perspective, we remain focused on bringing innovation
to the marketplace, by engaging our customers to make
sure that we’re meeting their increasingly diverse and rapidly
changing needs. Ultimately our customers are in control of our
investments from a technology perspective. So we will continue to
engage our customers to ensure that we continue to provide them
with aggressive and value-based offerings and meet their growth
and technology needs.
We’re also focusing on expanding in areas like mobile viewing,
providing greater on-demand viewing, continuing to provide the
best HD offerings in the marketplace and further enhancing our
evolving 3D offering.
Last, but not least, we’re going to continue to focus on mobility
as a priority for our consumer and business customers.
KM: For Comcast, we have the advantage of the most robust national
network in the country, hands down, which allows us a lot
of flexibility in how to use that network to meet our customers’
needs and demands. Interestingly, those demands are changing
pretty quickly before our eyes. So there’s a huge requirement, as
J.D. just mentioned, for us to be nimble and continue to innovate
in meeting those new needs.
Our goal is to be positioned to meet the plethora of different
activities and trends that businesses are engaged in. Like Cox, we
have seen tremendous growth over the last few years in the small
to medium enterprise segment, so for the foreseeable future, we’re
going to be very aggressive in that space.
MM: As we are transforming our 4G LTE network, which by the
end of 2013 will cover every market that’s currently served by 3G,
we also are transforming our business through collaboration and
openness. We’ve got an Open Development Program for thirdparty
devices, an LTE Innovation Center up in Waltham, Mass.,
our 4G Venture Forum, which is working with Google and Skype,
China Mobile, SoftBank Japan and the overall Verizon developer
community, and just this past month we opened our Application
Innovation Center on the West Coast for developers to work on
applications side by side with Verizon network experts.
These partnerships and collaborations are the building blocks
that will deliver even more innovation for our customers. And, as
we expand this definition of a wireless device with M2M and add
developers from around the world to create innovative apps, the
potential to improve our lives through wireless technology is limitless,
enabling each of us to work better, smarter and faster. nvtc
Allison Gilmore is NVTC’s Director of Communications
& Public Relations.
Fall 2011 www.nvtc.org THE VOICE OF TECHNOLOGY 29