Analysts Don Kellogg and Roger Entner are joined by Yago Tenorio, SVP and CTO at Verizon, to discuss the coming of 6G and the future of networks, as well as exciting real world use cases happening right now.

00:00 Episode intro

00:24 6G Innovation Forum overview

01:21 Lessons learned from 5G

03:59 What players are needed for 6G?

05:24 Actual test cases for 6G

07:34 Spectrum issues and ISAC

08:48 Future network infrastructure and monetization

12:44 6G Innovation Forum developments

13:20 Episode wrap-up

Tags: telecom, telecommunications, wireless, prepaid, postpaid, cellular phone, Don Kellogg, Roger Entner, Yago Tenorio, Verizon, 6G, 5G, FWA, drones, crowd detection, AI, LLMs, wearables, ISAC, network, spectrum, Google, devices, data centers, latency

Don: Hello and welcome to the 315th episode of The Week with Roger, a conversation between analysts about all things telecom, media and technology by Recon Analytics. I'm Don Kellogg and with me as always is Roger Entner. How you doing, Roger?

Roger: I'm great.

Don: So Roger, this week we have a great guest to talk with us about 6G. Yago Tenorio is SVP and CTO at Verizon. Yago, welcome to the podcast.

Yago: Hey, thank you for having me.

Roger: Hey, Yago, what a pleasure to meet you here on the podcast. You've joined Verizon two years ago and are making quite the impact. You have made an announcement around the 6G Innovation Forum. Do you want to tell us a little bit about it?

Yago: Yes, yes, time flies. Two years — yes, in October it'll be two years. So we launched the 6G Innovation Forum about a year ago with six founding members including ourselves. Now we just welcomed additional nine members to the forum, so we are 15 strong. And we set it up to look at use cases that we think 6G will be enabling, so that we can design the system bottoms up from there. So that's what we're doing.

Roger: So 5G gets derided for not having lived up to expectations. I think every generation gives us a use case that we didn't expect and it's a bigger success than we thought. Right, FWA is the killer one for 5G that nobody expected and it's transforming the entire telecom industry. But what lessons have you learned from 5G as you're approaching 6G?

Yago: That's a very good question. And by the way, there is still like three, four years that 5G has in it. And I think what we may see in the next three, four years, it'll be 5G doing the beginning of what 6G will be natively doing. So I think we need to still watch what's left. But you still ask a very good question, what have we learned? And I think a couple of things — the first one, reflecting on what I just said on the previous question, I think 6G could be the first generation that this industry takes the opportunity to define with the use cases in mind. So think first what are we going to be doing with it and then designing the technology, as opposed to just designing the technology based on speed and latency, performance, capacity, and then hoping that someone will come and use it for something. That's what we want to change, first of all.

Now, maybe more on the technical side, 5G came with some rupture — like you remember there were a lot of options that were suggested, like 1, 2, 3, up to 7. They were too many, but the industry decided to actually implement too few. So it dissolved, there was like a gap between 5G NSA and 5G SA. When you move to 5G SA it's difficult to aggregate capacity that is existing on 4G and 5G NSA. I think the industry needs to learn from that, and there is a lot of discussion and debate these days about the options, but I think hopefully this time we get it right. There are much fewer options. So I'm hoping that we make a good decision and there is no gap this time around, and it's a smooth way forward. And we're starting hopefully early enough to make these changes and adjustments.

Roger: And I think, as you pointed out rightly, these are not clear bright lines between one G and another — 5G and 6G will merge into each other and evolve from each other. But when I look at the 6G Innovation Forum membership list, it looks like the same suspects all over again. So is that what it is? How are we going to do the innovative things that Silicon Valley is clamoring for and tells us that the telecom industry is never delivering?

Yago: Yeah, so you need the usual suspects, as you rightly call them, as I think they are the ones who are going to build the system. But you also need all other kinds of players — like Silicon players, hyperscalers, security pioneers, test emulation players. Who's going to help you beyond the natural ecosystem, the usual kind of suspects' ecosystem, to figure out the use cases? And those are part of the additions to the 6G Innovation Forum that we announced last week. So for instance, we went with Samsung, with Qualcomm as well. We put together some trials on ISAC — one of them in Dallas during an international soccer event that happened in summer, that Spain happened to win.

Roger: You watched that? Congratulations, well deserved.

Yago: Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Roger: Well deserved. They were by far the best team, they did really, really well.

Yago: I can only agree with you, but I'm Spanish. So in Dallas, on the semi-finals, we set up a trial. I think it was very interesting because it was not limited to drone detection — this time it was about crowd detection on the fan fest area. So we were able to report in real time where there was a certain density of fans moving across the area. Actually, the organizers and the companies that were working on the area were extremely interested, which kind of proves the point, because we are trying to set up things and stretch the technology to do things that we believe we can monetize, and that's the whole point.

We also did some drone detection to test the bandwidth, and we did a few more things. So we did a prototype working on some wearables — usual glasses from Meta, Ray-Ban. So we deployed some GPUs at the edge of our network, and we trained an LLM in real time with the scores and all the news that were coming from each game. That LLM was trained in real time but also had all the history of whatever has happened in the history of soccer. And you can talk to your glasses, and because the GPU was at the very edge, the conversation was extremely fast and extremely responsive. So you could enjoy the game wherever you were and engage with your glasses on possibilities, probabilities, this player, that player, or arguing about anything — the LLM would know everything about the game. It took me a while to train the system to answer the question who's going to win the World Cup, but eventually—

Roger: Eventually it got it right.

Roger: So with ISAC and symmetrical AI uplinks demanding so much bandwidth, what needs to happen on the spectrum policy? Because it looks like to me we need wide, contiguous midband blocks for 6G actually to work as well as it should in the real world.

Yago: Yeah, you are absolutely right. Just take ISAC as an example — the accuracy, the precision of the positioning, the resolution of the network acting as a radar is proportional to the bandwidth. It's not proportional to the frequency, it's proportional to the actual width of the channel. So that's an important one, because at the end of the day, if 6G is standardized as a maximum 400 meg channel, that's what you are aiming for. But it's extremely challenging to find spectrum real estate that's going to be able to host a 400 meg channel per operator in the US. So that is challenging. Of course, there is a graceful degradation, so if it's not 400, you can always maybe down-select to 200. But at the end of the day, there are use cases like ISAC where resolution and precision depend on this.

Roger: Yep. So with AI really changing the way we use networks, both fixed and mobile — does that require a different kind of... leading the witness here — does it require a different network architecture? And how do you avoid being just a transport layer, because I think that's the big fear that the carriers are getting disintermediated. How do you play that role? And you have like a big relationship with Google that you announced recently.

Yago: Yeah, yeah, we do. Yes, it's a really good point. I think to your first part of the question — imagine an AI wearable, for instance. Imagine the way you use AI today, which is prompting — it kind of evolves onto a situational, context-aware AI that is watching everything you see and listening to everything you hear, for instance. I mean, it can be video, it can be audio, or it can be based on sensors, but at the end, there'll be an agent living on an infrastructure that's not with you and is absorbing and ingesting information in real time. That immediately changes the downlink-to-uplink radio ratio from the current 9-1, 8-2 we are used to, to something that is probably more 50/50, or even with the uplink having the majority of the load. The network is not designed for that, the standard is not designed for that, the architecture of the network needs to change again. If you're thinking of an AI wearable, you have to think of something that is extremely small, with very small ability to dissipate heat, or to generate power, or to host a battery. So that also points in the direction of an architecture that favors the device and makes the device's job much easier. So that's not the one that we have today. Something will have to change.

This is an excellent example of how understanding the use case may actually help in designing the system. For example, you're working very closely with companies like Google.

Roger: Yeah.

Yago: You provide services for each other, right?

Roger: Yes, yes, yes.

Yago: Yeah, yeah, yeah, and you are going in the direction of monetization, and you're absolutely right. And again, we can continue with the same example — so you have a device that is small and wearable and nearly invisible and weightless, but that device will not do the inferencing for you.

Roger: So is the operator just a pipe, taking that data closer to the inferencing point?

Yago: Even if it's just that, I think the operator will have a role in piping to the data centers. And as latency becomes more and more important and response time becomes more important, bringing and hosting part of that inferencing infrastructure inside the network. But even if it's not that, you can think of ways in which the network becomes the token provider, in a way. So I think that kind of distribution of intelligence is part of the answer to your question. The other part is new capabilities like ISAC again, where you can see a network providing connectivity, but at the same time and without compromise, also providing other sources of information — like feeding a digital twin, which in itself is very important. That's why we went in the direction of demonstrating crowd sensing and crowd detection. But imagine a network that is deployed to provide connectivity in a city could be the same very network that is monitoring the vehicle traffic in real time. That's a source of monetization in itself.

Roger: Yeah, and a lot of people in the financial industries are looking for where's the next monetization opportunity, and here it is. So what's next for the 6G Innovation Forum?

Yago: We'll keep working, I'm sure we'll keep adding companies going in the direction that you correctly pointed out — maybe non-traditional companies that can help us understand the use cases. We'll keep developing trials versus demos, engaging companies, testing interest, and we will keep working in the direction of LA 28. Because at the end of the day, I think that's the intersection between early readiness and the opportunity to demonstrate and display what 6G is going to be.

Don: Yeah. So, Yago, I think with that, I want to say thank you for coming on the podcast, really appreciate it, and telling us where Verizon and other companies in the eco-sphere are going with 6G. Really exciting.

Yago: My pleasure, my pleasure. Thank you for inviting me.

Roger: Thanks, gentlemen.

Don: Roger, we'll talk next week.

Roger: Thank you.