Out 22 hours ago.....

The carrier announced Monday it had formed the 4G Venture Forum (4GVF), which will include six venture-capital firms and Verizon's two main LTE infrastructure providers, Ericsson and Alcatel-Lucent. The members will work together to identify promising applications of 4G technology and fund them, with the firms identifying as much as US$1.3 billion available for development, said Verizon Wireless spokesman Jeffrey Nelson. The Forum is designed to help generate new ideas at innovative companies and improve the odds of their success, Verizon said. It will do so through investment, product incubation and market validation.

The group's scope isn't actually restricted to Verizon's network or LTE. It can support and fund 4G developments regardless of the underlying network technology, and the members have no obligation to work with Verizon and could work with other carriers, Verizon said. WiMax, the other major 4G technology, is already offered commercially by Clearwire in the U.S. and is technologically similar to LTE in some ways.


ALU is an INPH customer.
mike :-)