Verizon celebrates 20 consecutive years as a Leader in Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Global WAN Services

NEW YORK - Marking a full generation of networking excellence that has evolved from the earliest days of MPLS to the dawn of the AI-integrated era, Verizon has again been named a Leader in the 2026 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Global WAN Services.

This recognition notches Verizon’s 20th consecutive appearance in the Leaders Quadrant, a span in which Infrastructure and Operations (I&O) leaders navigated a constantly evolving market transformed by cloud-native architectures, Network as a Service (NaaS), and AI.

The recognition is based on a combined assessment of Ability to Execute and Completeness of Vision related to their activity and vision in the Global Wide-Area Network (WAN) Services market.

Verizon’s roadmap and offerings in the Global WAN market includes its Verizon AI Connect portfolio, which provides infrastructure and network services for massive AI workloads; self-healing network operations using agentic AI; satellite connectivity for direct-to-device service, emergency/SOS services, and IoT use cases; and software-defined networking and NaaS for scalable virtual and hybrid networking services.

Said Iris Meijer, Chief Product & Marketing Officer, Verizon Business: “We feel this 20 ^th  consecutive recognition as a Leader reinforces Verizon’s deep commitment to the customer and bold strategic vision toward delivering the infrastructure that powers global enterprise. Being, in addition, the only U.S.-based service provider in the Leaders Quadrant of the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Private Mobile Network Services, we are driving a converged connectivity ecosystem where WAN, Private 5G, and IoT work in unison to streamline operations and get customers to their desired outcomes. Increasingly, that includes leveraging Verizon AI Connect with our greater portfolio to handle the massive data ingestion required by autonomous agents, providing the programmatic scalability needed to manage AI workload surges with precision.”

Global WAN market definition

Gartner defines global WAN services as “points-of-presence (POP)-based services supporting multiregional corporate networks. Service providers own and operate their own global core networks and sell directly to the client. Services include transport-centric/unmanaged, managed, and co-managed network services, or network as a service via a monthly fixed or usage-based fee model.”

Mandatory Global WAN features assessed in the Gartner report include: ability to sell internet broadband service to enterprises globally, ability to sell MPLS to enterprise customers globally, WAN services portals and APIs, cloud interconnects, managed SD WAN services, and general availability of services with global coverage offered.

Common features include managed SASE, LEO satellite access, network function virtualization, Ethernet WAN, wavelength services, and others as outlined in the full report.

Evaluation criteria

For Ability to Execute, “Gartner evaluates service providers on the breadth of their network service portfolio in terms of features, quality and processes to deliver the services. These criteria enable service providers’ performance to be competitive, efficient and effective, and to improve revenue, retention and reputation in Gartner’s view of the market,” according to the report.

Gartner evaluation criteria for Ability to Execute puts “high” weighting on Customer Experience, Product or Service, Sales Execution/Pricing, Operations, and Market Responsiveness/Record. “Medium” weighting is placed on Overall Viability.

For Completeness of Vision, “Gartner evaluates vendors on their ability to convincingly articulate logical statements. This includes current and future market direction, innovation, customer needs and competitive forces, and how well these map to Gartner’s view of the market,” according to the report.

For Completeness of Vision puts “high” weighting on Market Understanding, Offering (Product) Strategy, Innovation, and Geographic Strategy. “Medium” weighting is placed on Sales Strategy and Business Model.

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