In this episode of Carrier 2.0, host Steve Saunders talks with Santiago ‘Yago’ Tenorio, CTO of Verizon, about the defining forces shaping the next generation of carriers. What defines Carrier 2.0? For Yago, it’s the carrier’s ability to translate connectivity into intelligence and intelligence into customer value. From how telecoms can truly monetize AI for customers to the realities of Open RAN and the coming 6G era, Yago shares a clear-eyed perspective on where innovation meets practicality - and what the industry must do to stay relevant.
Steve Saunders:
Welcome to the show. I'm Steve Saunders and this is my carrier pigeon. Carrier 2.0 is all about transformation. The strategies carriers are using to be relevant, competitive, and profitable in the new digital landscape. Today's guest is Santiago Yago Tenorio, CTO of Verizon.
It is time for the carrier question, the big issues that carriers can't avoid. The what key characteristic or technology will define the Carrier 2.0 Era.
Yago Tenorio:
Our ability to monetize AI for customers. Not our own use of AI, but how they use AI. To monetize that through new revenue streams, that is an inflection point. If the telco industry finds its place, will be in a completely different place in 10 years from now.
Steve Saunders:
What is your take on Open RAN these days? A lot of the time, I sort of suspect it's mainly been useful for keeping trade journalists employed and giving them something to write about.
Yago Tenorio:
I think, in general, the industry, the journalists, analysts, they were expecting something, was never going to happen. If your vision of Open RAN was like a play [inaudible 00:01:47] of small players that you can kind of mix and match as you wish and it's plug and play, that was never going to be the case. And I think, as carriers, we were all very clear that was not what was most likely going to happen. The paradigm of plug and play without any interoperability testing is just not possible. Of course, you can mix and match vendors, but it doesn't mean that you can do that without proper testing.
If you forget about that and you think of open interfaces that allow you to actually integrate different radios from different suppliers, and as a carrier, it allows you to procure radio units from different suppliers and then integrate them onto the software that you're buying from a third party, that has already happened.
Look at Verizon. We have over 30,000 base stations with Samsung software running on completely, totally off the shelf [inaudible 00:02:48]. All the interfaces towards the radio units are open. The answer to your question is that, there is a nomenclature problem. It's not what you think, it's not what you wanted it to be, it's what it needs to be and it's happening before your eyes. So, most of the industry is thinking, well, that's not happening anymore. Well, just wait.
Steve Saunders:
In a great example of everything old being new again, the MEF has rebranded again with a new name, again. Now, originally the organization was called the Metro Ethernet Forum, but then it shifted its mission from Metro Ethernet to focus on automated, scalable, and secure services. But that would've made it the ASSS forum. So instead, it just dropped the full name and went with MEF, claiming it didn't stand for anything anymore.
Well, now they're back on a new mission, related to network as a service or NAS. I guess they're making things easier or simpler. So, it's a bit like Little NAS. But they're not calling it the NAS Forum either. They've given it a completely new name. This one. Now, the organization formerly known as MEF says its new name offers a modern clear expression of its mission. Does it though? Made up words are a bit of a double-edged branding sword and in this case it's a little unclear how to pronounce the new moniker. Well, naturally I turn to the internet for help. Okay, let's see what the internet has to say about the pronunciation of the MEF's new name. Here we go. This is from TransPerfect.
Speaker 3:
M-P-L-I-F-Y.
Steve Saunders:
Okay, that probably is not the name they're really going for there. Let's try DeepL. What do they think?
Speaker 4:
MPLIFY.
Steve Saunders:
A little bit better, MPLIFY. All right, and Google thinks it's pronounced.
Speaker 5:
MPLIFY.
Steve Saunders:
Let's try one more.
Speaker 6:
MPLIFY.
Steve Saunders:
So, there you have it. We'd like to welcome the new MPLIFY organization to the telco industry. I don't think people really understand what artificial intelligence is. It's sort of more imitation intelligence really. But everybody's getting hyper excited about it at the moment. The VCs, the journalists, the PE companies. And when they're excited, it's always bad, always bad news for the industries.
Speaker 7:
I'm sorry Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.
Steve Saunders:
And service providers have been using it for years, AI. What's your take on it? Again, give me the Yago pragmatism here.
Yago Tenorio:
I'm with you. You're right also that carriers like Verizon or Vodafone before, they've been using this for years. You look at what do in Verizon, the way we plan the network, it uses artificial intelligence and before machine learning every day. Is it then true that something's going to change? Is there something coming? Is there something new happening? Well, possibly so. Even as a consumer, you may use your AI of choice, ChatGPT or Gemini or whatever that is. It doesn't matter. So, whenever you have a question, you ask your agent a question, you have to provide all the information, all the context about your question. You're probably only unlocking 10% of the power that this could have.
Imagine an agent that doesn't need to be provided with a context, because it has a context. It actually sees everything that you're seeing and it hears everything that you're listening to. So, not only no longer will you need to provide context when you ask a question. Further than that, you may not be actually needing to ask a question because it may actually preempt that and give you proactive advice or warn you about stuff that it's observing.
Steve Saunders:
That's both exciting and terrifying.
Speaker 8:
Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they couldn't, they didn't stop to think if they should.
Steve Saunders:
It's time to separate the signal from the noise and talk about what's real versus what's hype. Okay. So, signal-to-noise. Here we go. Quantum computing.
Yago Tenorio:
Oh, signal.
Steve Saunders:
And when? I guess. In a sentence.
Yago Tenorio:
I think we should do the signal-to-noise in decibels, because the noise in quantum computing is high, but there is no doubt that it's coming.
Steve Saunders:
It's coming.
Yago Tenorio:
And you think on Moore's Law, I think silicon companies are doing everything they possibly can, in a way that's super imaginative, to keep compensating for that. But I think that the progress is slowing down. I think, within the next 10 years for sure. Maybe in five years time.
Steve Saunders:
Okay, next one. Signal-to-noise, 6G.
Yago Tenorio:
Absolutely signal. It keeps me super busy these days. I'm working on it.
Steve Saunders:
Really? So, you're excited about it because a lot of carriers I've talked to have said, I wish vendors would stop talking about 6G, I'm still wrestling with 5G, but you not in that boat.
Yago Tenorio:
Listen, forget about terabits per second and microsecond latency. That is nonsense, that's noise. It's not about that. Imagine that you make 6G easier for the handset. Imagine you no longer need something as big as. Imagine you get more battery life and it works with less number of antennas, less power.
Steve Saunders:
You've talked about a new smartphone moment, what do you mean by that?
Yago Tenorio:
Towards what's left of this decade, we'll see a different way for customers to use the internet or to enjoy services.
Steve Saunders:
What's the technology which is driving that? Is it the network or is it the handset itself?
Yago Tenorio:
There may not be a handset anymore. AI will play a role in that. And then of course the concept of smart glasses and such has been overhyped a number of times and there is a lot of skepticism about that. But I think, unleashing all the full potential of AI assistants, agents, you call it, will require a new interface. And that will be the triggering point to provoke the change.
Steve Saunders:
A huge market is in industrialization, isn't it? Heavy industry and white-collar industries. And that seems to be where 5G is finally finding its popularity. Can carriers learn to love 5G and make money from it in those markets?
Yago Tenorio:
I agree it's gaining a lot of traction and it's a great kind of new revenue source for operators for a series of reasons. I wouldn't agree that it is the only thing that 5G succeeded. It's a great intersection where you can provide an industry, a corporate, with their own network through a combination of slicing or dedicated infrastructure, even dedicated spectrum. The range, the toolset is amazing, like from just slicing a part of a public network to create a wholly new infrastructure that serves a specific purpose, with the right mobility and quality and security. It's something that it couldn't be done before and it's completely wireless. So yes, possibilities are endless. But beyond that, you can also provide on-site infrastructure to process workloads. Service company like a carrier has so much power space and cooling available, capacity available, and servers and infrastructure, computing infrastructure, close enough to the customer.
Steve Saunders:
Do you have to understand their proprietary operating systems and operating environments and their business, at a level that you already understand consumers?
Yago Tenorio:
I think it depends on the case. So, for some specific use cases, you could argue that probably carriers are not the best place to prime a contract. But we can supply to specific kind of niche companies that know the business. If it's a very heavy industrial use case with a very specific, for other more common use cases that are not so specialized, and this could actually be like 80% of the cases, the best companies to prime that contract.
Steve Saunders:
Hyperscalers really need service providers in order to build this ecosystem. Do you think they understand that? Do you think they know that carriers are really an important ally for them in their journey to total global domination or whatever it is that hyperscalers want to do?
Yago Tenorio:
In general? First of all, connectivity is key to everybody, including themselves. So, even in the context of AI, just training their own systems and the amount of data that you need to move from A to B, that's also a great opportunity for carriers. That when you think on AI, it's not just having infrastructure in the right place, it's also having the ability to shift vast amounts of traffic from A to B, and we are actually just having a lot of new business for that very reason. So, I think that's a very good synergy and working together. So, who has the right infrastructure and the right power space and cooling close enough to the customer? Be it for sovereignty or be it for latency purposes, it's the carriers. How more granular the hyperscalers are going to go? Have they made that decision purposefully already? And where are the carriers then just stepping in?
Steve Saunders:
Yeah.
Yago Tenorio:
When latency becomes more and more important, I think we will find an answer to that and it'll give a carrier a clear role.
Steve Saunders:
Thank you so much. I'll let you go. I know you're busy. You've got $130 billion network to run.
Speaker 9:
$100 billion.
Steve Saunders:
And finally, today we leave you with an FNTV exclusive original footage of carriers' first attempts to deploy 5G. That was Carrier 2.0. Please subscribe, share, or just join the conversation, because the future of telecom is happening today.