Verizon battled headwinds tied to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic during its second fiscal quarter, but said that toxic breeze is driving its larger enterprise customers to more fully embrace their digitization efforts.

Verizon CFO Matt Ellis explained during the carrier’s Q2 2020 conference call that it saw a “14-cent headwind from COVID during the quarter.” That financial number is tied to the $1.14 earnings per share Verizon reported for the quarter, which means that without that toxic breeze it would have reported a return of $1.28 per share.

Most of that impact was felt across the carrier’s media business, which saw advertising budgets slashed, and its small and midsize enterprise customers that Ellis said, “saw some challenges during the quarter.”

Verizon rival AT&T earlier this week reported a $2.8 billion impact from the COVID-19 pandemic on its Q2 results.

As for its larger enterprise customers, Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg explained they were seeing this as a “time to digitize” their operations including further adoption of “SD-WAN, video conferencing, and mobile edge computing.” Conveniently, those are all areas where Verizon plays.

Moving back up the financial stack, Verizon reported that overall revenues dipped 5.1% year over year to $30.4 billion. That drop was mostly hung on a 25% plunge in spending across Verizon’s Media business. However, the carrier did a better job of reining in spending, which showed with a 19% year-over-year increase in net income for the quarter to $4.8 billion.

Verizon also exited the first half of the year with a majority of its planned capex in the field. Ellis noted that the carrier spent $9.9 billion on capex through Q2, but that the carrier remained committed to its previous goal of between $17.5 billion and $18.5 billion in total capex for the year. That full-year goal does include the extra $500 million Verizon committed earlier this year tied to bolstering its network to deal with more people working from remote locations.

The company is also maintaining its full-year guidance for the year, though under the questionable-for-2020 ideal that no other macroeconomic or broader issues impact its overall business. Financial analysts repeatedly pressed Verizon’s management for more details on that goal, with Ellis summing up its response by admitting that “the last month has added a layer of uncertainty” to the carrier’s Q3 view due to the uptick in COVID-19 cases being reported in many states.

Vestberg also said that the carrier remains on track with its 5G plans, and “in some cases ahead.” He did not provide any more details on where it might be ahead of schedule, but did reiterated that it was still set to have its millimeter wave (mmWave)-based 5G service in 60 markets by year-end. He also remained coy on Verizon’s “nationwide” 5G coverage plans, noting only that it was “scaling” toward that expansion goal.

Verizon rivals AT&T and T-Mobile US are now touting nationwide 5G coverage based on their use of low-band spectrum that has much stronger propagation characteristics compared with mmWave spectrum. Vestberg talked around the fact that the carrier will indeed eventually tap into its lower-band holdings that are currently busy serving its 4G LTE customers. Verizon is also expected to be a big bidder in the FCC’s Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) band spectrum auction that kicked off this week.