Verizon is throwing a lot of money at 5G. The operator spent $52.9 billion to acquire and clear an average of 161 megahertz of C-band spectrum in the recent record-high auction and intends to increase its capex by a cumulative $10 billion through 2023 to expand its 5G network.

“We will increase our capital by $10 billion over the next three years to put this spectrum into use as quickly as possible,” CEO Hans Vestberg said, during an investor event. The operator previously said it intends to spend $17.5 billion to $18.5 billion on capex in 2021, but the new guidance effectively increases that spend by an average of $3.3 billion for the next three years.

As such, the operator’s capex will effectively be in the range of $20.8 billion to $21.8 billion for the next three years, but that $10 billion investment won’t necessarily be evenly spent during that period. 

Verizon’s sub-6 GHz spectrum holdings, which the operator increased by 120% through the auction, will allow it to push mid-band 5G coverage to 100 million people in 46 markets within 12 months, the operator said. Verizon plans to ramp up C-band deployments in 2022 and 2023 to reach 175 million people, and it pledged to cover more than 250 million with mid-band 5G by 2024.

The carrier bet early and wholeheartedly on millimeter-wave (mmWave) spectrum for its 5G strategy and later used dynamic spectrum sharing to add 5G capability to its existing low-band 4G LTE network in late 2020. 

All of Verizon’s 5G New Radio (NR) deployments to date are riding on mmWave spectrum, and Vestberg said the carrier has 17,000 5G mmWave sites activated thus far. Equipment has been ordered and work is already underway to upgrade an additional 7,000 to 8,000 sites with C-band radios before the end of the year, he said. 

“We’re already preparing and working so that we will be ready to deploy this spectrum as soon as we have access to it,” Verizon CTO Kyle Malady said. He added that the operator doesn’t foresee the need to add more cell sites to its radio access network (RAN), but rather intends to upgrade its existing footprint and fill in with small cells where deemed necessary.

“We’re putting a lot of those cells on our own fiber, more than anyone else in the industry. We have an aggressive fiber build program in more than 60 markets,” he said. “About one third of our 4G and 5G cell sites are serviced by our own fiber today and we plan to increase that number to more than 50% in the next three years.”

The additional capacity enabled by that fiber and expanding 5G network will also allow Verizon to advance its 4G LTE and 5G fixed wireless service, which it expects to cover 15 million U.S. households with download speeds up to 1 Gb/s by the end of this year and about 30 million households by the end of 2023.

While Verizon is adding its 5G Ultra Wideband moniker to now include its mid-and high-band network, the operator dampened performance expectations for its C-band network, at least through the next 12 months, describing it as “incremental 5G bandwidth.”

Despite the accelerated network upgrade cycle that Verizon showcased for analysts and investors, it also pledged to bring network capex down around 2024. “There are a lot of things that are also coming down,” Vestberg said. “We have done the majority of our mmWave build. We will also come to the end of the fiber build.”

More specifically, Verizon plans to build 14,000 additional mmWave sites in 2021, bringing its total mmWave footprint to roughly 31,000 sites by the end of the year, Malady said, adding that “we’ll keep building after that.”

The operator expects at least 5% of its overall network usage to be on mmWave by the end of the year, and that could increase to as much as 10% depending on how quickly the country recovers from the COVID-19 pandemic and people get to enjoy live sports and entertainment at stadiums and venue, Malady said. “Over the next few years, we see a path for as much as 50% of our urban usage moving to mmWave in some of our densest markets, and our build plans target this footprint.”

Verizon also provided some new details about its aspirations on public and private mobile edge computing (MEC), which it’s deploying with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, respectively. The operator previously said it doesn’t expect to generate meaningful revenue from its edge service until 2022. 

The carrier didn’t put a specific number on the public MEC market, but 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 includes an additional $12 billion market opportunity for Verizon and its partners around applications and services, including partnerships it has struck for private MEC services with IBM for IoT, Deloitte for retailers, Cisco, SAP, and others, the company said.

Those figures for potential enterprise growth underline the importance of 5G MEC for Verizon because it represents the carrier’s best opportunity to grow service revenues for the next few years. Overall, Verizon said it expects service revenue to grow by 2% in 2021, at least 3% in 2022 and 2023, and 4% or more in 2024.