Verizon CEO warns against separate 5G standards, saying the world would suffer
- Hans Vestberg says the technology ‘is ultimately one of the most important infrastructures for the 21st century’
- He avoided taking a stand on the US ban of Huawei, but said any split in 5G standards would affect all sectors
Hans Vestberg, the chief executive of Verizon Communications, said on Thursday that the consequence of building separate standards for the next generation of mobile wireless technologies would be bad for global communications.
Vestberg’s comment came at Yahoo Finance All Markets Summit in New York, in a response to a question about whether US security concerns about China’s telecommunications giant Huawei Technologies were justified, as the company emerges as the leader in 5G technologies.
Vestberg declined to comment directly about that concern. But he said that if trust – among the various technologies’ developers, and the nations that would use them – is lost, the consequence might be that different 5G providers would devise different standards.
“The technology is ultimately one of the most important infrastructures for the 21st century,” said Vestberg. “If we go back to – some of you might remember – the CDMA and GSM age, that really is not good.”
Vestberg was referring to two different mobile phone technologies that until recent years split the market. Such a diffusion of standards in 5G would affect everybody and in all sectors, including education and health care, he said.