Verizon wants to be first with “6G” and is willing to press that cause with a handful of partners focused on driving that ambition.

The carrier recently launched its boldly named 6G Innovation Forum with partners Ericsson, Samsung, Nokia, Meta, and Qualcomm. That group has tasked itself with the heady goal of establishing “an open, diversified, and resilient 6G ecosystem and develop foundational 6G technologies while ensuring global alignment."

Verizon CTO Yago Tenorio explained to SDxCentral in an interview that use cases will drive this 6G development path.

“This time around, we want to design a 6G system with a set of use cases in mind, so that it comes to solve some problems, pressing problems, and enable some things that you cannot do today,” Tenorio said.

The executive, who joined Verizon last year having previously spent 25 years at European-based telecom giant Vodafone, pointed to a handful of those challenges. This included the growing need for mobile networks to deal with more symmetrical traffic patterns driven by new AI-related applications.

“Every system has been designed with downlink in mind, with radios that could be like nine-to-one or eight-to-two, or downlink dominated everything and uplink was a minority,” Tenorio said, noting current 5G network standards favoring more spectrum assets tied to the downlink channel in support of video streaming services. “Well, that may change. AI may change that.”

Tenorio also noted that 6G networks could be more important for edge-based services that need to support IoT devices with limited form factors.

“We don't know what's the form factor, but what we know for sure is that the form factor is going to be smaller, and smaller means less heat is able to be dissipated, there is less space for hosting a battery,” Tenorio said. “Then the question is, what 6G can really do to relieve the device from those limitations.”

This specific challenge is being tackled today with the 5G reduced capacity (RedCap) standard, but will likely be updated as the market turns to the next “G” iteration.

All invited, but who might join?

The forum’s initial partner base includes a handful of important names representing the traditional telecom equipment ecosystem (Ericsson, Nokia, Samsung), potential edge use case drivers (Meta), and a device chip giant (Qualcomm), but questions remain about future participants.

“Will we stop there? Well, not necessarily,” Tenorio said. “I mean, we already have a number of companies reaching out as a result of the announcement … that they are interested to understand more the purpose and consider a participation. And that's super good to hear. The more the merrier in general, as long as we keep it focused on the target.”

Tenorio did add that this “more” does not necessarily include Verizon’s direct rivals.

“That's a very interesting one that we have considered,” Tenorio said of potential inclusion of other operators. “I think there is one contention point here, which is one part of the purpose, we want to be first in the world. So how is that compatible with having others? Can we ask them to withdraw from that ambition? That’s probably not fair. I know it sounds a lot, self-centered and selfish, but if the purpose is to be first, we may have to go it alone.”

Verizon’s 6G “first” quest will be challenged.

T-Mobile US, Japan’s SoftBank, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE)-based e& are a few operators that have already started moving on 6G-based tests despite the fact a true 6G standard is not expected until the end of the decade.

This interest comes as analysts noted a dearth of 6G chatter at this year’s MWC Barcelona telecom event.

Michael Soper, senior analyst at Technology Business Research, during a post-MWC 2025 webinar stated service providers are “not particularly interested in speaking about 6G at this point,” adding that there was less 6G talk at this year’s event than at last year’s show.

Dan Hays, a partner at consulting firm PwC, concurred, noting this lack of 6G conversation was unlike past upgrade iterations.

“By my math, we're about six years into the 5G cycle, and at this point in most of the previous generations, the leading [mobile network operators] would have been issuing RFPs asking for proposals from network vendors for the next generation so that they could start to secure contracts and start to plan out their builds,” Hays said. “For 6G, that's not happening at this point, which is putting further pressure on a lot of the vendors, whether it's network equipment vendors, tower companies, construction companies, all of which like to see the light at the end of the tunnel in the next generation, but right now it's it hasn't materialized just yet.”

Haven’t we seen this story before?

Verizon’s 6G ambitions come 10 years to the month after a similar move by the carrier around 5G. The carrier at that time launched its 5G Technology Forum with a focus on leading early 5G standard development. That group also included Ericsson, Nokia, Samsung, and Qualcomm, with additional support from Cisco, Intel, and LG.

That work led to an early 5G technology standard Verizon used to power one of the world’s first “5G” network services. However, equipment for that fixed-mobile deployment was eventually replaced with standards-based equipment.

Tenorio said the carrier wants to avoid that previous deviation.

“That's not something that we want to do this time,” Tenorio said, adding, “We want to stay within standards, similarities straight away. We want to be first, same as last time. So that's one of the purposes, why we're doing this, and why this is important.”