CTIA: Verizon LTE Ready to Take on Clearwire

Conventional wisdom says that Clearwire Corp. has a “clear” time-to-market advantage when it comes to 4G mobile broadband, having several WiMAX-based commercial deployments planned for the rest of the year. It’s also somewhat dominated the business model discussions, touting the value of an open network. But during CTIA, Clearwire’s main rival in the 4G game, Verizon Wireless, made it known that it too has big plans for its LTE-based 4G mobile broadband network, hinging on applications development and consumer electronics.

First, to timing: Verizon expects to have two trial LTE markets by the end of this year, with a first commercial launch early in 2010, and 25 to 30 markets live by the end of 2010.

But in the meantime, it’s embracing the third-party developer trend. Clearwire announced its beta WiMAX network for applications programmers at CTIA, but Verizon countered with plans of its own: The operator said it would open up a test bed this summer, dubbed the LTE Innovation Center, which developers can use to design and test services in simulated LTE residential and business environments. The idea of course is to create an App Store/iPhone type of widget and services explosion for users.

And those services will run on a narrowed scope of operating systems, making it less expensive and labor intensive for developers to innovate. The current OS landscape has wireless devices running a myriad of software stacks, each of which has to be individually written to even if the application is common. That’s of course why an Apple App Store offering won’t translate to BlackBerry and vice versa.

"Well, there are about eight or nine different operating systems out there, and what that means for the operator is any time we get a new application we have to match it to both the device and the OS, and it really slows our time to market," Verizon Wireless CEO Lowell McAdam told reporters at CTIA.

The idea for both LTE and 3G is to instead “land on three, maybe four,” of those operating systems, layer standards across the top, and thus allow applications to hit all devices at the same time, he noted. The idea is to allow Verizon to publish services to multiple devices in a matter of weeks rather than months.

To that end, Verizon is joining up with China Mobile, SoftBank and Vodafone plc for the Joint Innovation Lab. Verizon Communications Inc. CEO Ivan Seidenberg explained in his keynote at CTIA that the JIL will bring together a range of ecosystem partners to focus on creating a platform to enable widgets and applications to run seamlessly on different handset platforms and operating systems across different mobile operators, while safeguarding customer security, data privacy and billing systems.

Next: Verizon’s Device Strategy