Wireless Exec Hands Out Phones, Cash During Chamber Breakfast

Everyone who attended the  Eggs & Enterprise Breakfast walked away with at least $1, and three lucky people walked out with brand new 4G phones.

Frazier & Deeter sponsored the June chamber breakfast meeting for the third year in a row, and Roger Lusby, managing partner for the firm's Alpharetta office, promised to do it again next year. Every person attending the breakfast got an envelope that contained at least a $1 bill from the firm. Five people, however, got $2 bills. That ended up benefitting their favorite charities by $300 each from Frazier & Deeter, also.

Jeff Mango, president of the Georgia-Alabama region for Verizon Wireless Amphitheatre, might have started out his talk to the business people by showing a "brick" phone, but he was giving away 4G phones after his talk was over.

Mango said Verizon Wireless has 5,000 employees in Georgia, with 3,000 in the metro Atlanta area, most of them from the Perimeter north. The company added 600 new jobs in 2009 at a new three-story building in Sanctuary Park in 2009, during the middle of a recession.

The company also invested $1.2 billion in infrastructure in Georgia, including work on the 4G network last December.

The wireless executive said he wanted to demistify something. In "3G" and "4G," the G just stands for generation. But he did say 4G is 10 times faster than 3G, which should reduce or eliminate all that buffering on YouTube videos and movies. By 2013 the 4G expansion will be complete, the fastest expansion of a generation ever, he said.