Verizon Under No Pressure to Reach New Deals, CEO McAdam Says

business community right now,” McAdam said. “There is a daily rumor about what we will or won’t do. There have been various announcements even over the last 24 hours.” McAdam said he's open to offers and will take phone calls, but observers shouldn’t read too much into that. “I like to consider myself a polite and hospitable person,” he said. “We don’t feel the urgency that seems to be out there in the analyst community, the banking community and the media.” Verizon pushed the envelope on 5G and that made a difference for the entire wireless industry, McAdam said. Two years ago, 5G was seen as something that would hit in 2022, he said. “I think we’ve seen when we put our effort behind a technology and you see the promise of a technology the entire industry seems to shift,” he said. The key to the IoT is battery life and industry needs to build batteries that last 10 years, he said. “When you look at connecting remote devices the game has changed completely,” he said. “You literally will consider embedding these chips into the paint on a highway or a parking lot so that you cannot only see how traffic is flowing but predict traffic flows and parking management and things like that.” Wireless and wireline networks are already converging, he said. “The largest fiber network in the country will probably be a wireless network,” he said. “We see the architecture … changing dramatically as a result of 5G.”