Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:07):
So it's Mobile World Congress 2025. We're back in Barcelona again and I'm talking with Yago Tenorio, senior VP and CTO now at Verizon.

Yago Ternorio, Verizon (00:18):
Correct.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:18):
Yago, great to see you. Thanks so much for joining us now. Thank you for having me. You're about four months into your role at Verizon. Could you just outline what your job entails and what is top of your agenda currently?

Yago Ternorio, Verizon (00:33):
So what the job entails, why is a big responsibility? So ultimately I'm helping Verizon with technology strategy or what we call strategy and technology enablement, but it's a big job in a great company. I'm enjoying law and when it comes to most pressing priorities, I am sure we'll talk about that. But anything that has to do with energy. Our radio network, which is a contract that's coming up at the end of this year, so there is a lot to do on that. Managing the OSS, contributing to the industry and industry standards. There is a lot to absorb for me and there is a lot to do, but there's a lot of priorities I would say.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (01:21):
So let's dig a little bit into the radio access network side. Can you just update us on Verizon's virtual ran rollout and the open ran strategy that goes with that?

Yago Ternorio, Verizon (01:36):
We just delivered the Super Bowl and it was the highest density event that we've ever seen in our network and probably the highest density event that anybody has seen. We carried like 38 terabytes in the Superdome, 93 in the area terabytes. I'm talking about. Wow. The previous highest event that we had ever seen before that was Taylor Swift to 16. So this more than doubled that capacity. We carried it with four gigabit per second downlink, two gigabit per second, AppLink zero congestion. My boss asked our customers to actually not use wifi and stay on cellular because the service was better, but that's unheard of before.

(02:27):
I have to say that the difference with the next competitor was quite stunning. So it was like five times more ling and two and a half times more. Right. And I'm telling you all this because well New Orleans is in a Samsung area, so this was a virtualized van.

(02:50):
Now you know the stack that Verizon is using is very similar to the stack that I was using in my former job. We call that open RAN. We call this virtualized RAN. I am in the business of thinking that labels don't actually matter. What matters is what you deliver to your customers.

(03:11):
Now I've heard many times before when I was in Europe that this stack, whichever name you want to give, it was not ready for prime time. You and me have talked about that not that long ago, about a year ago, was it ready for urban areas, is it ready for taking urban traffic?

(03:32):
And I think you heard me before saying I think so and in my previous job I was in the process of doing it well. I joined a company that has actually covered areas like Manhattan and Snia just to name two with virtualized run and it doesn't get any denser than that. Believe me, events like Superdome was only followed by the parade in Pennsylvania where the Eagles victory parade that was equally interesting to provide service to the service was immaculate. I think the best performance that we've ever got on an event of these characteristics and not only anecdotally it was delivered using virtual run, but I think I should say that the performance was this good thanks to the fact that it was a virtual van and that all the processing and the compute was virtualized and shared in a cloud at the far edge was a big factor that actually resulted in this performance.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (04:48):
Okay. So if we can continue to use the term though open ran as to kind of frame the conversation, how do you see that trend developing in the industry? Because obviously Samsung has now been working for Verizon for a few years and it was always a virtual ran deployment with the potential for open ran on the radio side and everything like that, but they always made that pretty clear without banging on about the open ran thing. But in other instances, open RAN is really front and center of the strategic messaging about what is going on and there seems to be a trend at the moment towards away from this kind of view of multi-vendor or best of breed opportunities, but more to a single company being in charge or delivering an awful lot of that technology with maybe just a few software tools that could be bought in addition and maybe a couple of small cell radios, et cetera. Do you see a trend one way or the other about how this is going and how this might be different from the vision that the industry had a couple of years ago?

Yago Ternorio, Verizon (06:09):
That's a really good question. I think it's a matter of timing. I think the industry is setting expectations may have not fully understood. What's the timing of operators to take on this? I mean if I have to answer your question, what's the take up on this? I think it can only accelerate. I mean we reached a point as I just described before, where not only the performance that we've been discussing many years if it was on par or not, no, it's not on par. It's better and there are very clear reasons why that is the case and why it is better. So it can only go up. Now to get us to this point, there was a number of things that needed to be true and now they're true. So operators, it is the case of Verizon had to get the cloud and in this case in the far, I have to say that probably no one better than Verizon got the cloud and it is playing to our advantage as a competitive advantage as a performance edge in a huge way.

(07:19):
Then you need to integrate that with the appropriate cast layer. So you need to select the right partner for the cast and then you need to integrate that with the software. Those things are difficult and those things take time polishing and fine tuning that software so that it actually warps fine in this stack takes time, those time this time has already passed. Now that's all behind us and that was the difficult part, but we've already done it right? Integrating a third party radio, I'm not going to minimize the e effort, but it is quite a linear thing. So you put in the e effort on the adequate locked infrastructure and then you integrate any radio with this because the interface is open. It'd be very difficult to do it if the interface was proprietary because then only the incumbent supplier can do it

(08:15):
If the interface is open, it's not plug and play, it requires integration, but that's what open brand is about. Now when I say you need to understand the timing, what I'm referring to is well sometimes it took some time to get this to work to this level of performance and then the discussion as to which point you bring third party radios and to do what is more a matter of optimizing the commercial terms. So it has a lot to do with the cycles for procurement on the different operators. How you heard me I think say before that when you look at which of the run traditional suppliers have the best radios, the answer is none of them because actually there's nothing that you can compare with picking the best radio for each of the models that you need. So whether it is low band, mid band or massive, there is always an edge that someone has got versus their competitors.

(09:23):
Well that's certainly the benefit of open brand, but that at the end of the day, that is a commercial benefit because that edge is usually on, it can be bandwidth, it can be output power, but most of the time it's energy consumption. So if you want to minimize your total cost of ownership, then you leverage Open brand. You have several suppliers competing for supplying the different models you need and you can go and pick, maybe you can pick the better ones that consume less energy so your total cost goes down. That's what we've been doing. That's what we've been working on. And in terms of mixing vendors, I would say two things. So Verizon did the first integration of a third party in the University of Texas integrating CommScope because it was the right thing to do for performance and we just announced that we deployed a Qualcomm RIC on top of Samsung Suite. Now you can look at this in many different ways, but certainly it is a multi-vendor integration.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (10:39):
And I mean that was a really, and yes, absolutely that is a third party integration and I'm sure we'll see more of that of these different building blocks coming in, but that was really interesting development there with that, the Qualcomm, Rick and that application going on, is that the only application at the moment that the Verizon is talking about or the only one that's using and testing out? Is this the open of a floodgate of multiple third party applications that could be run on this Rick?

Yago Ternorio, Verizon (11:17):
It's the only one we're talking about. Not necessarily the only one that we are considering now.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (11:24):
And you must be developing your own as well, I'm sure.

Yago Ternorio, Verizon (11:27):
Yes, we're very good at that. So I would say there is no floodgates. This is not about just opening the floodgates and then suddenly there are hundreds of obligations from third party vendors taking over. This is about doing the right thing at the right time and not necessarily following the pressure that the industry wants you to be multi-vendor. We're not chasing the headline,

(11:53):
we're just doing the best for our customers at this point in time. The best for our customers and for ourselves is to save energy in our deployment and saving energy in the best possible way can only be done deploying some AI that can look at the patterns estimates, how the traffic is going to evolve, and then making decisions about what you switch off and when you switch it back on so that you don't impact the performance. That's exactly what we wanted. That's what we done. Now is it the last thing that we are going to be doing with mul vendor? Trust me. No, there'll be more things, but I think we will follow our needs and what our customers need, not maybe what the industry is looking at as headlines.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (12:38):
And could you just briefly talk as well about other ways in which this architecture is enabling you to bring in maybe new AI capabilities that can help you? And are you seeing much here that's of interesting, you go, oh, that's a great evolution or development with ai that could help.

Yago Ternorio, Verizon (13:01):
Yeah, there is a lot of that. I mean I think this year has been again the year of AI for probably the third time in a row if I'm not wrong, right, which is great and there is a lot of traction. There is also a lot of hype and maybe a bit of tedia on AI. In reality, we've been using machine learning first AI later for over a decade and we've deployed in the way we do the radio planning, we've deployed in how we do the root cause analysis of a tenant incident. We've deployed on how we actually run an incident management in real time. And of course we've deployed to optimize the system performance as well. We've been using it over the last 10 years in many cases. And of course that is evolving and that is getting better. And now there are more things that you can do and gen AI is a more recent thing and it helps you deploy new use cases.

(13:59):
But there is no one interface or one platform you need to look at this. Particularly if you look at the entire OSS, I think you need to segment the OSS and come up with different platforms on different domains. Not too many, but certainly not one that are going to kind of aggregate and support applications in a meaningful way. And it's more important the sort of architecture you deploy and the fact that the language needs to be common and the data that these applications are going to use need to be the same. That's more important than just jumping to all the use cases that you can see here and trying to deploy them all like mushrooms in the field because then what result as that is a collection of these disparate things that is very difficult to manage.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (14:50):
Yeah, got to get the soil and the foundations in the field ready first before Absolutely. Yes. And grow the right applications. Now in moving from Vodafone to Verizon, you moved from one a ST space mobile partner to another. Can you update us on the relationship between Verizon and a ST space mobile and talk about the potential of direct to sell communications? Because SAT now has become a really big talking point, particularly in the past year as we move towards commercial service or we see commercial services being launched,

Yago Ternorio, Verizon (15:27):
We just deliver, I'm sure you read, we just delivered the first video call in the us. That's a super important milestone I think. Not only because of course it means high speed data, which is what we are after one part of what we are after. But it also means real time, high speed data. So a video call needs to work and needs to work here and now with adequate latency. So it is very demanding. Well, I think it sends a powerful message. It sends a message, no pun, it sends a message about the capabilities that we are trying to put in place, which is the most, I think similar thing or the easiest way to describe them is mobile broadband in a seamless way for our customers so that they don't even need to know that they are in the satellite business. So as my boss say in the extremely rare event that they are out of our terrestrial network coverage, which is very rare because we cover 99 dot something of the population in the us.

(16:40):
So surely they work, live and play. So where they work and live, I think for sure we are covered. Now if someone is playing on national park, I think we got him too. But the seamlessness of that service is what matters. So we are after mobile broadband service that can deliver a few megabit per second, at least in a seamless way so that customers can roam in and out of it without any effort on the smartphone that they use. So that hopefully they can keep using whatever applications and services they want to use. And that I think is the definition of a ST. And as you say, I've been working with them for a few years and I'm still working with them. So it feels very continuity.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (17:35):
And finally, do you have a message for the industry about what all the companies here at MWC could be doing to help companies like Verizon and the other telcos to help them take the next step that they need to take? Is there anything that they're maybe not doing quick enough or that they could be doing more of?

Yago Ternorio, Verizon (17:59):
Yeah, I probably have, I would pick two if I can select. So I don't need to speak about ai. I no need for encouragement I think. But if there are two things that we may be underestimating, one I talked about before, which is cloud run. So it is not necessarily giving you the same performance, it actually gives you better performance. So we must not forget that. And the other one that we tend to forget in general, not related to cloud performance, but across piece is energy. That is the single most important thing that we must not forget. So energy efficiency on everything we do. And it can be yes, an AI application that like the one we deployed that help you switch off components on the radio. Now I tell you what if those components, when you put them to sleep, they take six minutes to wake up, that's not good enough because the risk that you can take, if that is the case, it's not worth taking. So that limits the applicability of that layer of intelligence that you just deployed. So we need to go back to basics and have, well, not only PAs that are super efficient, but also systems that you can put to sleep and they wake up as quickly as possible. And we're talking seconds, not minutes. That's just an example. It applies the same when you think of servers, when you think of GPUs, when you think of CPUs, when you think of anything that we use, I think energy we must not forget.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (19:35):
Okay, energy management, that's the message to the industry. Yago, thanks very much for coming and chatting to us again. Always a pleasure to see you.

Yago Ternorio, Verizon (19:44):
Pleasure is mine

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (19:46):
And look forward to seeing you well, certainly before, but back here again in 2026. Thank you very much.

Yago Ternorio, Verizon (19:48):
Thanks very much. Great to see you.