Alacatel-Lucent Looks to Jumpstart LTE Adoption

In the hopes of delivering that type of service, Alcatel-Lucent announced today that it has recruited five additional members, including Gemalto and Creative Labs, into its ng Connect consortium of vendors backing the Long Term Evolution (LTE) wireless network infrastructure technology.

LTE, sometimes referred to as 3.9G wireless networks, is a class of network infratstructure for telecommunications carriers that promises to provide somewhere from 3 to 5 Megabits per second of bandwidth to the typical mobile user.

The addition of Gemalto to the Alcatel-Lucent consortium is significant because Gemalto brings single sign-on (SSO) technology that will be important in terms of enabling portable identity using either a dongle or SIM card across multiple services that leverage LTE technology.

At present, there are 26 companies participating in the Alcatel-Lucent LTE initiative. The three other new members include cloud computing platform providers R360 and Vgate and content provider Kabillion. Other key members of the consortium include Hewlett-Packard, Samsung and QNX Software Systems.

New applications that LTE will enable include delivering IPTV to mobile clients alongside e-learning and e-health applications plus an enhanced gaming environment.

What’s unclear at the moment, however, is how much opportunity there will be for LTE technologies as 4G wireless network infrastructure continues to develop.