Company Overview

Verizon is a provider of wireline and wireless communications products and services to individuals and businesses. It serves some 55 million customers in 49 states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico. It also publishes information directories with a total circulation of 136 million. Verizon came into being in 2000 with Bell Atlantic’s acquisition of GTE. It acquired MCI in 2006. Verizon Wireless, a joint venture with Vodafone, is the second biggest wireless company in the U.S. Verizon Business was formed six years later when Verizon bought MCI, creating a global advanced communications and information technology powerhouse to serve large business and government clients.

The corporation operates through three divisions: Telecom, Business, and Wireless. Its telecom operations include about 45 million access lines in 28 states and Washington, DC. Verizon Wireless, the company's joint venture with Vodafone Group, is the No. 2 US wireless provider (after AT&T Mobility, formerly known as Cingular), with around 60 million customers. It remained on the Fortune 500 list in 2007—claiming the 13th spot—due to 24-percent revenue growth driven by new wireless subscribers, which curbed its $23 in fiber optic cable expenditures and investments needed to compete with Comcast as a provider of both cable and Internet services. Profits dropped 16 percent over 2005, and employee growth slowed after a big year. But the company still made it in the top 50 of Fortune’s Global 500. In November 2007, Verizon earned some press by separating itself from its competitions in a very significant way. The network sold itself to football fans by ensuring one of the most anticipated NFL match-ups of the season—the Packers versus the Cowboys—would be made available for free only on NFL Network through Verizon’s standard service package. The same week, it announced that it had begun putting its fiber optic purchases to use by rolling out high-speed symmetrical FiOS Internet services in 16 states served by its advanced, all-fiber-optic network. The symmetrical services make possible equally fast downstream and upstream connections of up to 15 or 20 megabits per second (Mbps). At the same time, Verizon dramatically increased the upload speed of its fastest FiOS Internet services.

In 2008, the company will go BYO with its services, allowing customers to use devices from other companies (tested and certified in VZW's new $20 million test lab) in the Verizon wireless network. Experts and analyists couldn’t predict whether it would be as transformative an offering as Verizon’s president and chief executive officer Lowell McAdam expects. But it was just another move in the increasingly aggressive competition between it and competitors such as Comcast and AT&T. According to industry insiders, Verizon might have its eye on a merger as it begins testing for Long-Term Evolution (LTE) mobile technology. Analysts keyed into the market have said the high-speed infrastructure Verizon has its eye on could not only mark a significant upgrade from the technology Verizon currently uses but also lead to a consistent system across Verizon’s network and its part-owner, Vodafone Group, which already operates Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM)-based networks on four continents and plans to test the LTE technology at the same time. The testing could lead both companies to drop their old networks and merge into one very powerful entity, a move that would be consistent with the predictions of analysts such as Jack Gold of J. Gold Associates, who, in an article circulated the first weekend in December from IDG News Service, predicted that major consolidation would lead to the domination of the global cellular industry by five major operators within a few years.