Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg claimed the operator has a two-year head start on mobile edge computing (MEC) that puts it in prime position for a land grab among enterprises. This includes recent moves with cloud hyperscalers Microsoft and Amazon Web Services (AWS).

The operator earlier this month activated its private, on-premises MEC service with Microsoft Azure and plans to expand its 5G MEC offering with AWS for private networks in similar fashion. 

Verizon hopes that widening its net for enterprise deals, by offering a private 5G network service on Azure and eventually AWS, will allow it to capture early wins with enterprises that are eager to add private wireless capabilities to their IT infrastructure. The operator hasn’t pinned a date on the AWS private variant.

“We are the pioneer and the only one in the world so far where we launch mobile edge compute, where we bring processing and compute to the edge of the network for new use cases,” Vestberg said at this week's Goldman Sachs Communacopia conference, according to a Seeking Alpha transcript. “All in all, we are creating a market where nobody else is right now. I mean we have created this market.”

This new model also creates a “much more intense” relationship between Verizon and enterprises, he said. “We’re still the only one in the market that has commercial offerings both on private and public,” Vestberg boasted. 

Verizon’s bifurcated approach provides flexibility for enterprises to purchase and maintain equipment independent from the operator, or buy hardware and capacity from Verizon as a more holistic managed services offering, he explained.

“It’s a dramatic change because, ultimately they’re going to use licensed spectrum instead of unlicensed spectrum,” Vestberg said. Primary enterprise interest flows from a desire to substitute WiFi with improved security, throughput, speed, and latency, he added.

Verizon previously said it doesn’t expect to generate meaningful revenue from its edge service until 2022. Speaking at the operator’s investor event earlier this year, Verizon Business CEO Tami Erwin said the total addressable market for private edge compute will reach $1 billion by the end of 2022, and up to $10 billion by 2025.

The MEC market opens an additional $12 billion market opportunity for Verizon around applications and services, including partnerships it has struck for private MEC services with IBM for IoT, Deloitte for retailers, Cisco, SAP, and others, according to the operator. 

“Over time ... it's going to be a revenue source that we're going to talk much more about,” Vestberg said.

He also maintained that the operator is on track to meet its 5G infrastructure deployment goals this year, including more than 14,000 millimeter-wave (mmWave) sites and up to 8,000 sites running on its recently acquired C-band spectrum. 

Verizon increased its capex by a cumulative $10 billion through 2023 to expand its 5G network and it pledged to cover 100 million people with mid-band 5G in 46 markets by March 2022.