Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg joined his T-Mobile US colleague this week in backing the financial opportunities ahead of operators coming off of their expensive 5G network deployments.

Vestberg, speaking at this week’s J.P. Morgan Global Technology, Media and Communications Conference, said the carrier’s multi-billion-dollar bet on 5G will back revenue-generating services targeting consumers, fixed-wireless access (FWA) and private networks.

“All three of them are now happening. We talked about them for many years and they're all three happening, and they're built on the same infrastructure,” Vestberg said. “So basically I have three business cases on the same infrastructure. That was the whole idea of the strategy to see that we have the best return on investment on the capital. We invested in a network to see that we have as many use cases and as many connections as possible on one invested network.”

Verizon has spent tens of billions of dollars on spectrum and equipment over the past several years to support its 5G network. However, the operator is beginning to curtail that investment as it now looks to squeeze profits from those efforts.

Verizon spent $23.1 billion on capex in 2022, which was substantially higher than the $20.3 billion it spent in 2021. Much of that increase was tied to expediting the build out of its C-band spectrum holdings, which the carrier paid $45 billion to acquire. Nearly all of that C-band spectrum is supporting the carrier’s 5G network.

However, the carrier is forecasting capex of between $18.25 billion and $19.25 billion for 2023. That will include the final $1.75 billion of guided spend on the C-band deployment, with Verizon’s now former CFO Matt Ellis previously stating the year-over-year drop in total capex will “drive higher free cash flow in 2023 despite increases in cash interest and cash taxes.”

Vestberg has further tempted investors by stating the carrier was currently planning around $17 billion in capex for 2024, “which we expect to represent the lowest capital intensity in over a decade and among the lowest in the industry,” he said during the carrier’s full-year 2022 earnings call. “We expect we will deliver a best-in-class network experience while reducing our 2022 capex leveraged by more than $5 billion over the next couple of years.”

T-Mobile US CEO Mike Sievert, speaking at the same investor event this week, showered praise on the industry’s 5G investments.

“Overall … this industry is delivering the dividends on 5G that we promised,” Sievert told attendees at this week’s J.P. Morgan Global Technology, Media and Communications Conference. “Revenues and cash flows are vibrant in the industry because we made these investments. … And what you have is a vibrant, growing, profitable industry where both the industry and consumers are winning, and that’s what we see. We don’t see anything in the last quarter or two that changes that.”

Specific to his entity, Sievert noted that T-Mobile US reported a modest 3% year-over-year increase in service revenues for the first quarter of this year, but a more robust 46% year-over-year surge in cash flow for Q1 and is guiding a 75% full-year increase in cash flow for 2023.

Vestberg said the carrier expects the consumer market to accelerate over the next five years. He explained this was on the back of the growing number of consumers with 5G-enabled devices and the increased reach of the carrier’s more spectrum-dense 5G “Ultra Wideband” network.

Vestberg had previously noted the carrier was ahead of schedule to hit 250 million potential customers covered with its C-band spectrum by year-end.

Verizon is currently using an average of 60-megahertz of C-band spectrum for its 5G network, though it acquired access to an average of 160-megahertz of spectrum across the country. The carrier was part of a recent filing with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) that will provide operators with more access to those spectrum assets.

That access will also help Verizon continue to expand its FWA service. Vestberg noted FWA is “the killer application today,” echoing a statement from T-Mobile US Chief Marketing Officer Mike Katz during that carrier’s most recent earnings call.

“We use the same technology, same radio base station, it's not a separate network,” Vestberg said of Verizon’s support for its growing FWA business. “That's definitely the key application that's not only for consumers, it's also for businesses, retailers, SMBs are using that as the primary tool for broadband.”

Verizon reported 393,000 FWA connection additions during the first quarter of this year, pushing its total customer base to 1.9 million customers. That growth surpassed what it added the previous quarter and continues to support announced plans for 5 million FWA customers by 2025.

Sowmyanarayan Sampath, EVP and CEO for Verizon Consumer Group, told investors at a conference earlier this month that growth has come with very little additional investment. Sampath explained that the carrier does not have any “FWA-exclusive builds in the network,” meaning that all of its FWA customers are tapping into network infrastructure that was deployed to primarily serve its traditional mobile customer base.

“At some point we will when we get to that point and that will be a clean [return on investment] decision whether we build capacity for FWA or not,” Sampath said. “We don’t have that today.”

Vestberg also backed Sampath’s most recent comments on Verizon’s private 5G network growth and that impact on its slower-to-materialize mobile edge compute (MEC) business.

“When you have [a] private 5G network, you can in the next step put in mobile edge compute, meaning cloud services at the edge,” Vestberg said, adding that the carrier has MEC deals in place with hyperscale giants Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft. and Google Cloud. “We're partnering with all of them, all the three big ones.”

Despite past comments that the MEC market itself continues to lag expectation, Vestberg said Verizon remains committed to the space for the “long term.”

“That's why we built a network. That's why we bought our spectrum in order to see that we can monetize it in different ways,” Vestberg said. “Private 5G networks is just a slide-in to get in, and then you start adding on that security, mobile edge compute; it could be virtual SD-WAN and things like that on top of it.”