I’ve been thinking recently about the importance of reliability. It’s not always flashy, and sometimes it can be taken for granted, but it’s often the trait we seek out across all areas of our lives - friends, cars, airline arrival times, even dishwashers. We tend to place a high value on the people and things able to reliably deliver, time and again, when we need them most.
That’s how we approach building and maintaining our network, knowing that our customers expect consistently high performance and also depend on us for reliable connectivity. It’s why we’re proud our customers rated us best for network quality 13 years in a row in the J.D. Power Wireless Network Quality Study. It’s why we’ve been rated best overall network by RootMetrics 15 times in a row. And it’s why in RootMetrics’ latest report, “Checking in on 5G Progress in 2021: Who’s Currently Leading the 5G Race,” they noted that Verizon offers unbeatable 5G reliability in the majority of metro markets tested.
The concept of reliability was never more important than during the COVID-19 pandemic when many of us rapidly transitioned to working and learning from home. Verizon’s network was a lifeline for our customers to communicate with family and friends as well as continue their jobs and studies.
As we start looking at the future, many of the lifestyle changes from the past year may not be going away. Our Look Forward study, conducted with Morning Consult, found that among those who’ve worked at least partially remotely at some point in the last year about 7 in 10 (69%) say they would like to be working remotely at least 1-2 days per week a year from now. Use of collaboration tools like video conferencing on Verizon’s networks is still a remarkable 2872% above pre-pandemic levels while traffic across secure networks (VPN) also remains 91% higher than pre-pandemic volumes.
This shift in worker preference underscores the importance of network reliability as our customers are increasingly trusting us with their livelihoods over the long term.
As we continue living with COVID and enter a new season for hurricanes, wildfires, and other natural disasters, our commitment to reliability during these events means we go above and beyond to create multiple redundancies within our systems, use the latest technologies to maintain and repair sites as quickly as possible, and often deploy the most portable assets to ensure service is restored quickly.
And as more customers take advantage of our 5G network in 2021, we will continue to deploy the most advanced technologies and the highest quality networks with the best reliability for our customers.
