Going where no wireless company has gone before

Lowell McAdam was four years into his Navy career when he realized he wanted to branch out and round out his skill set. He soon enrolled in the MBA program at the University of San Diego, setting himself on a path to the world of telecommunications.

Telecom has always been on the cutting edge of technology and McAdam was drawn to the way it made – and continues to make – a difference in people’s lives and business operations. So it comes as no surprise that 25 years later, McAdam is at the helm of Verizon Wireless as its president and CEO and is deep in the trenches of leading the industry in the next wave of wireless growth.

While executives across the globe can’t live without their cell phones and PDAs, McAdam recalls the days when cell phones were in their infancy. It was in the mid-90s and McAdam was vice president of international operations for AirTouch Communications, heading up the Korean, Japanese and European properties.

Regarding America’s cell phone culture, McAdam jokes, “At that point, we had send and end voice on analog and you could have any color you wanted as long as it was black.” In Japan, however, the landscape was entirely different. Text messaging was widely used, cool new devices were being introduced and content was quickly becoming a part of the mobile platform. “When I rode the trains in Tokyo and saw how everybody had their phone out, I realized how big the potential was in the US,” McAdam says.

Today, McAdam, who spends a lot of time out of the office visiting other locations and retail stores, is attached to the newly released Blackberry Tour. Not only is it global, but McAdam, like many other executives operating outside of office doors, feels the email feature of the Blackberry is indispensable.

Tipping Point

McAdam has seen a lot of change in the last 25 years, but there has been nothing grander in magnitude and scope than the creation of the cell phone. Spending the first ten years of his career in the wireline business – or the telephone industry – and then moving over to the wireless side for the next 15, he says the arc of change in technology since the cell phone was implemented has been far greater than anything in telephone technology.

Second to the cell phone’s breakout role has been fiber optics, namely for the speed it can deliver. “The more speed you can provide, the more applications are turned loose from the desktop and put onto the mobile device. Fiber optics really sped up the backbone for the wireless network as well as the wireline network,” McAdam explains.

But it wouldn’t be the 21st century if we were to stop there. At this year’s CTIA wireless conference, Verizon Communications’ Chairman addressed the audience to say that Verizon sees the wireless industry on the verge of a tipping point that will unleash the growth potential of next-generation wireless technology – and Verizon is primed to help lead the industry to this next level.

“We’re beginning to launch the fourth generation technology,” McAdam says of the next generation platform called Long Term Evolution (LTE) technology. Comparing the lab environment to the field, McAdam continues, “In the lab environment today, 3G is in the one and a half to two megabit range; in the field, it’s closer to a megabit or less.” Meanwhile, 4G LTE will be able to deliver 12 or 15 megabits in the field – an exponential jump from today’s speeds and standards.

In fact, with 4G technology, “we’ll see virtually everything that’s on the desktop including video moving onto the mobile device.” The technology is slated to get deployed later this year, while being commercial in a couple markets by the same time and fully mainstream in the country by 2012. And that’s when the industry can really take off, bringing together higher speeds, newer devices, innovative applications and network capabilities.

“The beauty of this technology is, as developers around the world come up with new applications for the mobile device, there will be a lot of features that come out in the next five years that I can’t even describe today,” says McAdam. “The latency of LTE is so low that you’ll almost have real time back and forth across the globe, opening up all sorts of consumer electronic possibilities.”

Also at the CTIA wireless conference, Verizon announced a partnership with China Mobile, Softbank out of Japan and Vodafone, who is the largest global wireless provider and owns a 45% stake in Verizon Wireless. Together they will speed up the development of mobile widgets and other content through the Joint Innovation Lab. This will allow developers to bring web applications or widgets to all four companies in one easy step.

“They will write the application once and it will go across all of the handsets we have in the market,” says McAdam, “and the important number here is between the four carriers, we have one billion customers.” So in one fell swoop, developers can reach one of the largest populations of mobile users.

Taming the Beast

Despite its contribution to the economy – Verizon Wireless has invested $50 billion since the company was formed and that’s not including what’s yet to come with the introduction of the 4G LTE technology – McAdam says the number one issue that Verizon and other wireless carriers face is keeping regulation out of the industry. “Our concern today is that we have state by state regulation on things such as towers and taxes, and there is talk about federal regulation as well,” McAdam says, adding that as the wireline side of the business gets smaller and smaller, there is less for regulators to do so they want to regulate wireless.

But as regulators get their hands on wireless operations, they bring with them the mindset of a wireline monopoly regulatory framework. McAdam believes that this kind of meddling is unnecessary. The wireless industry is a highly competitive market with customers who are able to move freely between carriers; if one carrier doesn’t deliver, then a customer can easily walk away.

McAdam recently had an experience in his hometown of Mendham, New Jersey, where it took 12 years to get a tower approved. And Verizon had to go all the way to the Supreme Court to make it happen. “We’re the highest rated company in the industry for customer satisfaction and to have to go through that kind of a deal to provide vital services to a community is just silly,” McAdam says disapprovingly.

To mitigate the challenges of regulation, Verizon is continuing to focus on what it does best – and that’s serving customers well. If the company keeps the customer first, all of the other important aspects of the operations such as performance will fall into place, giving regulators little motivation to get involved.

After all, Verizon has been consistently recognized year after year for its operational excellence, from being the highest ranked wireless company on IDG’s Computerworld annual “Best Places to Work in IT” survey to outpacing the industry average for wireless phone service satisfaction in the American Customer Satisfaction Index.

On Verizon’s reigning position, McAdam says, “Technology by itself isn’t going to be the differentiator. Where we think we excel is by keeping our focus on the customer and executing and delivering every day on the fundamental things that the customer wants better than anyone else. And that’s really been the winning formula for us over the last nine years.”