Verizon Moves to Silicon Valley, Targets 4G Roll-Out with LTE

 

San Jose, Calif. — With more than 500 developers in the audience, Verizon at an industry event this week is enlisting the application development community to adopt its network as the location of choice for applications.

 

With several announcements, the telecom giant has set in motion an effort to focus the community on developing for its 3G network and migrating to the 4G network as it rolls out. Previously, Verizon Wireless announced it was going to deliver to Boston and Seattle as the first two cities for LTE.

 

This event was not about the future of devices – rather, it was about offering a network interfaces to the developer community. The network interfaces include access to the billing system, network location information and some forms of messaging. The Service Execution Gateway will support delivery of services with four APIs one of which is internal to the Verizon’s OSS.

 

Verizon expects to be able to manage the security of these services and will be enabling delivery and verifying the security. Officials say their intention is not to charge for certification onto the network. They say they intend to support free applications.

 

Applications that have fees associated with them Verizon expects to have a revenue share model where they will render the bill and handle all other aspects. Their portion will be 30 percent for these services.

 

To ensure that they are open to the community, officials at Verizon have included a Verizon Developer Advisory Board that includes representatives from Capcom Interactive, EA Mobile, Gameloft, Gravity Mobile, iSkoot, Networks in Motion, PacketVideo, Siri, Slacker, Tribal Tech and Zed Group.

 

The expectation is that the advisory board will continue to support the adaptation of the network APIs.

 

Also announced was the Joint Innovation Lab which will be aimed at supporting of the applications with China Mobile, Softbank, Verizon and Vodafone. This represents an ecosystem of one billion subscribers. Masayoshi Son indicated in his video presentation that porting for European and Asian markets would be enabled through JIL.