Alcatel-Lucent Launches Global Initiative to Drive Development of Ultra-high Bandwidth Applications

Alcatel-Lucent recently announced a global multi-industry initiative, the ng Connect Program, to bring together device, application and content providers to drive the development of innovative services for 4G, Long Term Evolution (LTE (News - Alert)), Gigabit Passive Optical Network (GPON) and other ultra high bandwidth networks.

 

The ng Connect Program will help establish a rich and diverse ecosystem of infrastructure, devices, content and applications for these bandwidth technologies, officials said. The program plans to help customers stream more content, run more sophisticated applications on-the-go, and communicate in the most popular formats of today and tomorrow.

 

Founded by Alcatel-Lucent (News - Alert), the ng Connect Program includes members like HP, Samsung, 4DK, Buzznet, chumby, Connect2Media, dimedis, FISHLABS, QNX, SIGNEXX, Total Immersion, TuneWiki and Words & Numbers.

 

Officials said the ng Connect Program is formed to bring together organizations, which are developing cutting edge technologies and services to reshape the way people communicate, interact online while on the go.

 

By helping bring new applications and services to market more quickly, the ng Connect Program will facilitate an expansion of the revenue base for network operators and others. For this, the ng Connect Program will promote a variety of pre-integrated solutions featuring the latest innovations in network, device and software technologies.

 

“As we move into the next phase of the evolution of broadband networks with the advent of ultra high bandwidth systems such as 4G and GPON, it is critical that a broad spectrum of companies - including those from industries that are not normally associated - come together in a strong ecosystem that can effectively innovate, remove business and technical barriers and define new business models to accelerate mass adoption of new services and devices,” said Tim Krause (News - Alert), chief marketing officer at Alcatel-Lucent, in a statement.

 

Like other industry verticals, LTE can revolutionize the automotive sector. According to Dan Dodge, CEO of QNX Software Systems, a reliable high-speed connection transforms the user experience in a vehicle.

 

“The car becomes an Internet terminal, an edge device, providing users with real-time access to the latest applications, data, and content. LTE complements our own vision of enabling cars that dynamically connect to the Internet cloud, to consumer devices, and to one another,” Dodge explained.

 

With the ng Connect program, Alcatel-Lucent plans to create an open ecosystem so that the trusted capabilities of service providers can be combined with the innovation of the Web to bring whole new classes of services to market, services that can leverage the growing capabilities of service aware IP networks, IP Multimedia Subsystem (News - Alert) (IMS) and more.