Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg today dismissed concerns about the operator’s lagging position on a nationwide 5G footprint and said the network will reach that goal before a 5G iPhone hits the market.

“We build 5G right. We want it to be transformative. We don’t want it to be inferior to a 4G network,” he said during an investor conference. “The ultra wideband is something that is just extraordinary. …  It’s 10-, 15-, 20-times faster than our 4G network. That’s something transformative.”

Verizon has activated its millimeter-wave (mmWave) 5G network in 36 cities to date and maintains that it will reach 60 cities before the end of the year, including an effective doubling of the footprint in the cities it launched last year.

“We will also have nationwide [low-band 5G] when it’s commercially in the right timing of it, so we will definitely have that in the later part of this year,” Vestberg said. “We’re going to build it on something called DSS (dynamic spectrum sharing). The DSS trials are going very well. Our technology team is basically telling our commercial team, ‘OK, tell me when we’re going to turn it on to our customers.’”

Verizon’s spectrum position, particularly a lacking supply of mid-band spectrum, has pushed the operator down this path, but Vestberg said he feels good about the assets it has today. 

“Long term, we think that there’s a great opportunity for the C-band [spectrum] because it’s a good spectrum,” he said. “We will, as usual, look into that and see if that is something we want to add to our portfolio.”

Verizon’s technical team is “constantly evaluating return on investment between adding spectrum, densifying the network, or putting in new types of software in the networks,” Vestberg said. Carrier aggregation, for example, has increased Verizon’s network capacity by two to three times, he added.

“Our team is constantly thinking about the future, different constellations of technologies, different types of carrier aggregations, how would the chipset and the network work with the software in order to get the best performance,” Vestberg said.

Verizon’s mmWave network expansion will also contribute to a wider footprint for its 5G fixed wireless offering. The operator expects to have the service live in 10 cities before the end of the year, along with new equipment that can handle the radio signal and WiFi, according to Vestberg. 

“This is a totally transformative business” with self-install, no bundles, and guaranteed speeds of 300 Mb/s, he said.

“It’s going to take us some five to eight years to build that out with what we want to achieve,” but Verizon anticipates expanding fixed wireless to every market served by its mmWave network, Vestberg said. 

He also outlined the operator’s vision for 5G in the enterprise, especially as it relates to the company’s mobile edge compute offering with Amazon Wavelength. The companies activated the service in Boston and the San Francisco Bay Area last month and plan to reach 10 markets before the end of the year.

“Nobody has built this before,” he said. The framework allows developers or enterprises to work directly with Amazon to develop and deliver a service on 5G mobile edge compute, and pay for storage per hour based on usage, much like its other cloud services. 

“We have our cut on that from Amazon, so the whole offering here is coming from Amazon and their normal sort of cloud offering,” Vestberg said, adding that private capabilities for enterprises and industrial environments are still under development. 

Verizon is also working with software companies like IBM to create services that require low latency, high throughout, or enhanced security on 5G. 

“Ultimately we want to ride together with the developer communities that are out there instead of Verizon creating something new,” he said. “There are many of them and hopefully we’re going to have more developer communities come in as we want to see other cloud providers being able to provide what Amazon is doing today.”