In an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek, Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg talked about Verizon’s recent cloud partnership with Amazon, as well as the transformative effects 5G will bring, especially when paired with cloud computing.

On Cloud Computer Partnership With Amazon

“It is extremely exciting…we spent almost one and a half years with Amazon to do this. So—just to understand what we’re doing with Amazon—we’re bringing the cloud service out to the edge, together with 5G, in order to give super low latency, enormous throughput for applications being developed by developers.”

“This cannot be done. This is the first time in the world where actually we have seen that partnership. Amazon couldn’t have done it by themselves, because they don’t have wireless 5G. Verizon couldn’t have done it by itself, because we are not in cloud service, we don’t have cloud software. The combination of us can create something that is so transformative that, today you basically as a developer you can click on our first 5G edge site in Chicago and start developing an application for 5G with low latency, enormous throughput.”

“Of course…we’re one site right now. Think of us when we have hundreds of them, maybe thousands of them, over time….We can then give 5G experiences of low latency….Autonomous cars, real-time AR/VR, artificial intelligence, all of that can be at the edge.”

“And we’re just seeing the start of it, so that’s why we’re so excited about this partnership and what we launched 3rd of December last year.”

On How 5G Differs From Previous Generations

“Remember, when the design of 5G was done, the idea was this is wireless technology for industries and society….It was of course thought that consumers would get the benefit, but from the beginning was: How can you take away all the cables in the world and have the same performance as you had with cable, being much more agile, having new ways of doing it? That was the idea.

“When I think about 5G, 4G has basically two capabilities: speed and throughput. The phone is better every time you get a new generation. In 5G, eight currencies: battery optimizations, low latency. I mean, just one of the currencies, today I can connect 100,000 devices per square kilometer, tomorrow I can do 1,000,000. There’s never going to be 1,000,000 people on a square kilometer, so it’s done for devices talking to devices, optimizing flows for industries.

“So where are we? I mean, the plan was actually to come out 2020. We came out 2018. I think we’re ahead of the game, but still, from a consumer market, we’re just now starting to massively come into it. As we have said, this year we’re going to launch 20 5G phones….We think that our 5G is so different from others, because the performance on our millimeter wave 5G is just extraordinary. Today I get 2 gigabit per second in my phone! If you have a 4G phone, which you probably have over there, you probably have 40 to 50 megabits per second on Verizon, which is the best network in the country. And here we’re getting 2 gig. You cannot even imagine how much faster that is.”