From the newsletter (September 14; sign-up or follow if you want it sooner): Verizon is expanding its 6G Innovation Forum as operators hunt for AI-driven use cases and a credible investment case for next-gen cellular. But private 5G (and IoT and lots else) offers a warning: network success rarely arrives as a single killer app, with one big industry windfall.
Just off the weekly RCR all-hands call, where the team reflected on the Mobile Future Forward event in Seattle last week – lots of discussion, apparently, about telcos wrestling with the 6G investment case, missing the AI innovation (speed) boat, and running out of road eventually on their new AI efficiency drive. The same stories have played out in this newsletter for weeks and months, of course, and today is hardly any different. But the lord loves a trier, and the big telcos are still making the right noises. Today (September 14), Verizon has expanded its 6G Innovation Forum (6GIF) with nine new joiners: AWS, Cisco, Intel, Keysight, MediaTek, Nvidia, Palo Alto Networks, Rohde & Schwarz, and Viavi.
They join Ericsson, Samsung, Nokia, Meta, and Qualcomm – as the founding members of the new 6G club. Their strategy is “collaborative”, and “bottom-up and use-case driven”, says Verizon. This ‘team sport discipline’ has been discussed since the early days of 5G, with mixed results. The nominal “use case”, it seems, (“specific target”) is to “enable and scale AI workloads and the massive AI ecosystem – particularly the emerging class of AI-enabled wearables like untethered smart glasses… [and] ISAC technologies.” Wearables have been on the cards for ages; the late-era 5G and early-phase 6G focus is mostly on smart glasses with heftier uplink capacities.
We have written plenty about ISAC recently. The group will test applications, spectrum bands, and bandwidth requirements, says Verizon. The new members “inject critical multi-disciplinary capabilities” across cloud services, advanced silicon, test emulation, network security, and graphics simulation. Verizon has live edge-AI trials in play, variously, including a couple of ISAC examples: for crowd density detection at an international ‘soccer’ (football) “celebration” in Dallas, using virtualized AI RAN and edge AI in a CBRS set-up (with Samsung); and for drone and vehicle safety tracking in San Diego, using 100MHz-400MHz of 5G SA millimeter-wave spectrum (with Qualcomm).
It also has a research prototype for fans to watch live ‘football’ (soccer), or otherwise, from the comfort of their homes, wearing smart glasses (Meta AI) connected on Verizon’s ‘edge network’ to a small language model (SLM) and/on a desktop AI ‘supercomputer’ (Nvidia DGX Spark). Verizon and co have their eyes trained on the Olympics in Los Angeles in 2028 as the “ultimate interim proving ground on the road to commercial 6G deployment”. If Verizon et al are to make the case, and not to miss the boat or run out of road, then the clock is ticking, fast. Make those use cases stick. If there was ever a warning sign, they might consider the private 5G story. Which everyone said failed.
Except, Juniper Research has just published a report that makes-out like the private 4G/5G market – meaning dedicated all-edge cellular – is positively booming. It forecasts spending on private 4G/5G will reach $84.7bn in 2031. Exactly what sits inside that spend calculation is another question – the methodology isn’t fully exposed in the sample – but it appears to encompass network equipment and wider deployment/integration ecosystem. It would represent growth of 400% – from $17.3bn in 2026. Which is enormous – particularly when conventional 5G infrastructure forecasts ($67.5bn or $70bn in 2031; picked at random) are in roughly the same ballpark.
The Juniper figures should be questioned – perhaps RCR will have time – and there is a likely apples-for-oranges miscalculation in any such comparison, based at least on the fact the private 4G/5G figures include expensive integration. The definitions aren’t like-for-like; it’s finger-in-the-air stuff, but interesting nonetheless. Juniper is certainly bullish. It writes: “Dramatic growth reflects how quickly private networks are delivering significant value across different verticals. As AI systems scale up and become central to business operations, private networks are becoming the default way to ensure AI systems have robust connectivity.”
Juniper says it studied eight industry ‘verticals’ in 70 ‘market’ countries – and 13 vendors besides. It has ordered the teams, placing Nokia top of the pile, leading (in order) from Huawei, Samsung, HPE, and Ericsson. Which seems like a screwy league, if you ask us. Ericsson is doing better, confirming a private-5G win last week with Minneapolis-St Paul International Airport. Incidentally, it has just delivered a kind-of regional macro-scale version (at a push) today with rural Kansas-based provider Nex-Tech Wireless. All right; it isn’t private 5G, and it wouldn’t make the Juniper count – and it is an upgrade rather than a new installation. But some private utility networks are not so different.
In the end, the point is just that Team Verizon has to make 6G stick for users, and accept that – as with private 5G – genuine successes may be obscured, as they are shared, and their spoils are split within a proper ecosystem. Which will be the same with the bigger AI market, whatever kind of grid-role role telcos crave out for themselves. Because telcos keep looking for singular proof that a technology has “worked” – the killer app, the breakout case, the revenue bonanza – when network technologies more often succeed in much messier ways, with value distributed across ‘over-the-top’ and new in-between players that are often invisible to the industry itself. They should know this by now.
