- Verizon’s CTO told Fierce that power and AI concerns would be addressed from the ground-up with 6G
- Use cases will be key, he said
- The operator – and its partners – still expect to stick to the 2030 timeframe for 6G
Verizon is creating a 6G lab with partners Ericsson, Meta, Nokia, Samsung and Qualcomm in order to develop the standard around use cases rather than the other way around.
Verizon intends to start the 6G lab in Los Angeles. It said that the forum will move beyond theoretical discussions and progress toward tangible 6G advancements and the realization of potential new use cases.
“With previous generations we failed ... to identify the use cases before the technology came,” Verizon CTO Santiago “Yago” Tenorio told Fierce. “This time we will do it with a use case in mind, so we’ll be bottom-up as opposed to top-down.”
6G AI and power saving
Initially, he explained, Verizon and its partners will be using 5G use cases developed in the second half of the decade as the basis for 6G development. This includes use cases for AI and battery-powered devices.
For instance, since 3GPP Release 17 was finalized in March 2022, the Reduced Capability (RedCap) protocol has optimized the 5G specification to use less power so it can be used by IoT devices and wearables, he noted.
6G will need to be designed so that “devices don’t need so much power and battery,” Tenorio said. This will be quite different from the bolt-on optimizations that have occurred with the 4G and 5G specifications.
He also noted that 6G will need to take a very different approach to uplink than previous 3GPP standards. This is because of the rise of AI applications and agents on the cellular network.
"The minute you start uploading content to make your AI agent aware of everything that’s happening around you – audio, video, sensing, or whatever – that floods the application,” Tenorio said. “The mobile networks were not designed for that.”
6G researchers have already noted that AI could help with increasing connection density and high data volume management, as well as global and seamless coverage. Adjusting the cellular uplink to deal with increased AI demands will, however, be key for 6G.
Still a 2030 timeframe
Tenorio said that this won’t change the date that the 6G standard gets initially standardized, which is still expected in 2028, or when the standard goes commercial, which is expected to happen in 2030. “The other important milestone to consider is the 2028 Olympics,” Tenorio noted, although he didn’t elaborate much further on this.
Regular readers will remember that Verizon took a similar tack with its 5G Technology Forum – which included Cisco, Ericsson, Nokia and Qualcomm – in the early days of 5G, introducing a 5G radio specification in 2016. It followed that in 2018 with its millimeter wave (mmWave) based 5G ultrawideband (UWB) specification, which started as a fixed home internet service and was criticized because of the coverage range that mmWave delivers. Verizon will still try to deliver 6G as early as possible but the CTO said that the operator will stick to the 3GPP schedule for 6G.
Much like other telecom executives who have spoken with Fierce, he said 6G shouldn’t have a new core network, noting how much time, expense and technical difficulty the 5G standalone (5G SA) core caused for 5G deployment.