Sprint Commits to Offering More Support to LTE Acceleration Lab in Israel

Letting startups run at their natural fast pace and allowing them to retain their creative control seems to be Sprint’s idea in order to unlock innovation in the LTE space, as opposed to driving what developer startups do.

By allowing the ecosystem to determine the direction of projects while supporting their ideas, Sprint may be opening new complementary ideas to what has already been done regarding LTE innovation.

Sprint announced its plan to support an LTE acceleration lab in Tel Aviv, later this year, in collaboration with the Israel Mobile & Media Association (IMA). By taking this approach, Sprint is allowing the mobile ecosystem to innovate on its LTE network with the hope of ultimately enhancing its customers’ mobile experiences.

Ranked second behind Silicon Valley as a top ecosystem of startups and developers, Israel has a rich and diverse mobile and media ecosystem. With IMA helping accelerate the go-to-market of more than 100 companies in Israel, the LTE acceleration lab is expected to further enable startups and developers to access the platforms needed in order to ideate and build. The Sprint-sponsored idea lab offers an open developer environment that will help create opportunities for innovative services, products and technologies that will be developed and launched on the Sprint LTE network.

By allowing startup developers access to this lab, Sprint is offering these innovators valuable access to dramatically speed up their time to market.

Startups will get to work on their ideas, collaborate with other companies and see what evolves. While Sprint gets an early look at the technology resulting from this collaborative effort, it’s an open approach to development, and Sprint will offer minimal carrier direction to startups who decide to use the lab.

The ecosystem will also get to test new products on advanced mobile devices and on the latest LTE network technology.

Leveraging its vendor relationships, equipment will be provided by Alcatel-Lucent, while the ng Connect Program, founded by Alcatel-Lucent, will help in creating the next-gen user experience for connected consumers.

When it comes to enabling network innovation, Sprint is definitely on the right track with this LTE lab, and is sure to be among the first to benefit from the innovations coming to the relatively new LTE network.