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Verizon chief technology officer and senior vice president of technology development Yago Tenorio told RCR that the industry needs to avoid fragmentation as 6G moves toward commercialization
In sum – what to know:
Uplink gets reworked – AI wearables could reverse today’s traffic patterns, forcing 6G to support continuous, high-volume uplink traffic while addressing device power and thermal limits.
Spectrum becomes critical – Verizon says ISAC will require much larger contiguous spectrum blocks, with policy pipelines for around 400 MHz per operator in mid-band spectrum.
LA tests readiness – Verizon sees the 2028 Los Angeles Summer Olympics as an interim proving ground for AI workloads, wearables and software-driven vRAN ahead of commercial 6G deployment.
The transition from today’s 5G Advanced trials to a commercially deployed, AI-native 6G network will require changes to network architecture, devices, spectrum policy, and industry standards, according to Verizon chief technology officer and senior vice president of technology development Yago Tenorio.
In an interview with RCR Wireless News, Tenorio said Verizon is taking a use-case-driven approach to 6G, with AI-enabled wearables among the technologies shaping the requirements for the next generation of networks.
“Moving from 5G Advanced trials to a commercially deployed, AI-native 6G network requires solving several fundamental hurdles,” Tenorio said.
AI wearables could force a rethink of the uplink
One of the most significant changes could involve the direction in which traffic moves across mobile networks. “Today’s networks are heavily biased toward downloads. However, ambient AI wearables (like smart glasses) require continuous, always-on contextual feeds of high-definition video, audio, and sensor telemetry up to the cloud or edge. The key technical foundation for 6G is designing a more balanced uplink/downlink radio protocol that can handle continuous uplink data without degrading system performance or burning through device battery and thermal limits,” Tenorio said.
The challenge extends to the devices themselves. “Sleek, form-factor-constrained AI wearables face severe limits regarding power output, battery capacity, and thermal dissipation. Constant uplink streaming drains batteries rapidly and causes thermal throttling. 6G must optimize network efficiency to natively reduce device power consumption by up to 10x,” Tenorio said.
ISAC puts new pressure on spectrum
Verizon is also testing Integrated Sensing and Communication (ISAC), although Tenorio said the technology will not be standardized until 6G. Testing the technology with 5G can help the industry understand the adjustments needed for 6G standards and support discussions around monetization models, he said.
Venue operators and event managers have shown strong interest in real-time crowd-density tracking and crowd-flow heatmaps, including applications such as stadium gate management and concession-line optimization. Tenorio also identified low-altitude airspace tracking for autonomous drone safety and protecting sensitive enterprise or municipal perimeters as potential applications.
“Capabilities like Integrated Sensing and Communication (ISAC) scale precision directly with channel bandwidth. To reliably track targets or distinguish small drones from birds, operators need far larger contiguous blocks of spectrum than what is currently deployed. Establishing policy pipelines for ~400 MHz per operator in mid-band spectrum is critical for real-world ISAC,” Tenorio said.
Tenorio also stressed the importance of avoiding fragmentation as 6G standards develop. “The industry needs to align strictly behind a single, unified 3GPP standard with native Open RAN specifications from day one. We must avoid the early mistakes of the 5G era, where proprietary deviations introduced unnecessary ecosystem complexity,” he said.
Los Angeles becomes a 6G proving ground
Verizon sees the 2028 Los Angeles Summer Olympics as a major checkpoint on the path toward commercial 6G deployment. “We view the 2028 LA Summer Olympics as the ultimate interim proving ground on the road to commercial 6G deployment in 2030,” Tenorio said.
The company plans to fully scale collaborative research, prototyping, and multi-vendor stress tests through Verizon’s established 6G Lab in Los Angeles.
The Olympics will also provide an opportunity to test high-density AI workloads, including scenarios involving thousands of fans using multimodal edge-AI experiences such as Verizon’s AI Sports Companion prototype, which runs Small Language Models and GPU edge inferencing on Meta smart glasses.
Verizon also plans to use Los Angeles’ C-band and millimeter-wave grids to stress-test software-driven vRAN upgrades and evaluate how the network handles heavy uplink traffic generated by context-aware wearables and live-event streaming.
For Tenorio, these trials are part of a broader effort to ensure that 6G is developed around the applications it is intended to support rather than simply around higher network performance.
