Verizon’s strong fixed-wireless access (FWA) growth is being boosted by robust enterprise demand as organizations are increasingly looking to address use cases like backup and connectivity to branch and store locations.

Verizon CFO Tony Skiadas told an audience at this week’s Morgan Stanley European Technology, Media and Telecom Conference that more than one-third of the carrier’s FWA connection growth is coming from the carrier’s enterprise organization, headed by Verizon Business CEO Kyle Malady.

“Kyle and the team are doing a steady [100,000], 135,000 fixed-wireless adds and those are both on LTE and 5G,” Skiadas said. “It resonates with customers. It’s very simple for businesses as well. You don't have to run wires, so customers liked the product. They like the security and the reliability of the Verizon network and that's something that's very important for business customers.”

Skiadas also showed his CFO hat by adding that even if that enterprise usage is for backup, “it’s low usage, high margin,” though the carrier is also starting to see adoption by enterprises looking to connect branches and stores.

Verizon recently reported that it added 384,000 total FWA connections during its most recent third quarter, which boosted the carrier to 2.7 million total FWA connections. Skiadas this week added the carrier was “probably a little in front of” its forecasts of having up to a total of 5 million FWA connections by 2025.

“We're not ready to give a new target yet … but we're very pleased with the progress and our engineering team is way out in front of the demand,” Skiadas said. “Our internal targets are obviously much higher, but we're very pleased with the progress thus far.”

Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg during the carrier’s Q3 earnings call boasted that it has constructed its network to handle “way more” FWA connections. That boastfulness is backed by the ongoing integration of additional C-band spectrum that the carrier gained early access to in August.

That additional capacity will initially go to bolster Verizon’s current urban cell sites, with geographic expansion planned to begin next year.

“That’s an even greater opportunity for us because there are more underserved markets and our fixed-wireless access will come extremely quickly into those markets,” Vestberg said of those expansion plans.

Verizon is also sitting on a trove of millimeter-wave (mmWave) spectrum that it continues to roll out in dense areas to back its C-band spectrum.

“This is how we built our network from the beginning — to be able, from the data center to the edge of the network, to have a total harmonized network that can move all the data. And then at the edge of the network we will have different types of access technologies in order to serve our customers, and fixed-wireless access can serve many different use cases,” Vestberg said of the carrier’s view toward its network assets.

Skiadas added to that network capacity claim by countering comments attributed to Verizon’s cable-based broadband competitors that wireless-based FWA operators would soon run into capacity issues once a large enough mass of customers began consuming hundreds of gigabytes of data per month.

“The network team is way out in front of the demand curve here in terms of what we see in terms of growth and if we have more demand for fixed-wireless access, that's a good problem,” Skiadas said. “We have plenty of ways to take pressure off the network, whether it's cell splitting or using millimeter wave, but there's options for us there and that will be a good problem to have.”

Private networks remain a work in progress.

Skiadas touted Verizon’s private network progress with the National Football League (NFL), the Cleveland Clinic and Black Rock, “and those customers are very satisfied with the services they have, with the security, and the bandwidth and reliability of a private 5G network.”

Vestberg previously stated that most of the carrier’s work today continues to be around proof of concepts (PoCs) but is building toward commercial deployments.

“They start pretty small,” Vestberg said of the carrier’s private network work. “They start as Wi-Fi substitution and then when it works, let’s say you have one big logistics company, they take the one logistics center and then they do it in all. We are in the phase of ramping that up to do one-to-many at the moment.”

Despite the growing optimism, Vestberg did add that he does not expect private networks to start contributing “any significant revenues that have an impact on Verizon overall in 2024. We’re going to see that in 2025.”

Skiadas echoed those expectations.

“The early returns are good,” Skiadas said, adding “we’re still early days for private 5G, but we do see a growth opportunity there as customers continue to adopt those networks.”