Marilyn O'Connell, CMO of Verizon's landline unit and a key player in its FiOS rollout, is retiring after 24 years at the company and its predecessors. She joined GTE in 1984 as a marketing manager
and worked her way up after GTE merged with Bell Atlantic, forming Verizon. Verizon says it will name her successor shortly.
Verizon's earnings primarily derive from growth in the
company's wireless business. The landline unit has suffered as consumers continue to drop their home phone lines, Amol Sharma reports, but FiOS has shown great promise. FiOS is a fiber-optic TV and
Internet network that is pitting the company head-to-head against cable providers. Verizon has signed up 1.6 million video subscribers and 2.2 million high-speed Internet subscribers as of the third
quarter.
O'Connell, 53, who was named CMO of the Verizon Telecom unit in 2006, wasn't immediately available for comment.
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