VIDEO: Verizon Wireless to announce LTE vendors next week: New wireless technology to be central to broadband expansion

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Richard Lynch, CTO of Verizon Communications Inc. and former CTO at Verizon Wireless, said the company would announce its vendor partners for its planned LTE launch, which is scheduled to begin by the end of the year.

“In the next couple of weeks over in Barcelona, I’ll be announcing the selection of vendors for our LTE or Long Term Evolution technology choice,” Lynch said, speaking at Silicon Flatirons’ Digital Broadband Migration event at the University of Colorado at Boulder. “We’re already engaged in multiple trials of LTE in partnership with Vodafone and are actively planning to deploy a network that will co-exist with our existing 3G platform. We’re in the final stages of selecting our vendors, but more importantly I’ve told those vendors they need to be up and running this year.”

Lynch also said LTE technology, running over the nationwide 700 MHz spectrum it acquired during a government auction last year, would be instrumental in Verizon’s plans to expand its broadband services to markets where it currently does not provide wired Internet services. The carrier’s 700 MHz winnings include licenses covering the entire U.S., except for Alaska.

“I’m from Pennsylvania, and there’s a lot of places in Pennsylvania that are very, very difficult if not impossible either for physical reasons or economic reasons to deploy fixed services like FIOS,” Lynch said in response to a question about brining broadband to rural areas. “On the other hand what I will tell you is that when we went after the 700 MHz spectrum, one of the things I told my planners was don’t tell me about a replacement for EV-DO, tell me how we’re going to be able to utilize LTE for both fixed, wireless broadband as well as mobile broadband. And while I can’t stand before you today and tell you I’ve got it solved, my belief is in places that you’re talking about a wireless solution is far more viable than a fixed solution would be.”

Lynch also touched on Verizon Wireless’ continued expansion of its Open Developers Initiative, which is designed to allow application developers and device manufacturers unimpeded access to the carrier’s network, so long as they meet certain minimum requirements.

“We now have nearly 40 devices certified for use on our existing EV-DO network and many more in the pipeline,” Lynch said. “It’s not something that we make an awful lot about but it continues to become a more robust ecosystem as we move along. When we get to LTE, we firmly believe that this process will accelerate and we’re working hard to stimulate this nascent ecosystem right now.”

–Dan Meyer