Verizon’s consumer chief: Net neutrality ‘went literally nowhere’

Today, I’m talking with Verizon consumer CEO Sowmyanarayan Sampath, who goes by “Sampath.” As CEO of Verizon’s consumer division, Sampath oversees the biggest part of the business: Verizon Wireless, which has more than 115 million wireless connections, and Fios, which adds another 10 million or so consumer broadband connections to the mix. That’s something like a solid third of the entire country in business with Sampath. As you’ll hear, Sampath is a longtime Verge reader, and in particular he’s been paying attention to my coverage of both 5G and the net neutrality debates for a long time. So we talked very directly about whether the huge 5G investment had actually paid off — whether the “race” we were supposedly in with China was actually worth it, and what kinds of new apps and services actually come to light. You’ll hear Sampath say that network capacity isn’t a small thing, and 5G really helped with the explosion of mobile data — although I was told we’d all be doing robot surgery ... Read full article.