Verizon spearheads LTE advances

LAS VEGAS -- Verizon is hoping to spark development of 4G wireless products and applications by founding an "innovation center" aimed at creating a wide range of devices and services for mobile broadband.

The Long Term Evolution (LTE) Innovation Center, whose creation was announced at the CTIA Mobile Life convention in Las Vegas Wednesday, will serve as a test lab for wireless device and application developers that want to try out their products on mobile broadband networks. Verizon says its goal is to use its experience in deploying mobile broadband to "help developers assess what types of new products and services may best succeed in the marketplace."

The Innovation Center, which is expected to open later this year in Waltham, Mass., will also get an assist from Ericsson and Alcatel-Lucent, two of Verizon's primary vendors for initial LTE network deployments. Verizon says the two companies will provide a broad range of equipment to application and device developers, including commercial-grade hardware and software for prototyping new products. The companies will also work to help developers deal with service integration and hand-off issues for LTE networks to ensure that their devices and applications run smoothly when shifting to different access points.

The center will be focused on three major product areas: consumer electronics and applicances; machine-to-machine products that wirelessly deliver information between devices specifically designed for fields such as healthcare, security and utility monitoring; and telematics applications, such as the GPS solution used by UPS to track its vehicle fleet.

During his keynote address at CTIA Wednesday, Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg said that his company was still on track to deploy LTE on a limited basis later this year, with plans to roll out the technology in between 25 to 30 markets in 2010.

Seidenberg said that LTE had the potential to deliver wireless broadband technology that would for the first time enable high-quality mobile video streaming and videoconferencing.

"The speed, reliability and capacity of LTE will take connectivity to a whole new level," he said. "Wireless will become so deeply embedded that it will seem less like a product and more like an extension of our lives."

LTE is the latest variation of Global Systems for Mobile Communications (GSM) wireless data technology and is seen as the natural progression of High-Speed Packet Access, the GSM technology that is used by carriers such as AT&T to deliver 3G mobile data services. In the United States, Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile have committed to start deploying LTE over the next two years. Verizon has performed trials of LTE technology with Vodafone in the United States that have demonstrated peak speeds of up to 80Mbps.