Partners in Verizon's most recently announced LTE deployment will include hardware vendors Ericsson and Alcatel-Lucent, packet core vendor Starent Networks, and IMS partner Nokia Siemens.

Verizon Executive Vice President and CTO Dick Lynch has been vocally supporting the 4G standard LTE (Long Term Evolution) for two years, and only two months ago said LTE services could begin by December of this year. In Barcelona today, Lynch discussed Verizon's LTE deployment plans, which more realistically anticipate construction to begin in 2010.

Verizon's plans for LTE include IMS-based converged applications and services by Nokia Siemens and Alcatel-Lucent. IMS stands for IP Multimedia Subsystem, an infrequently used framework designed for delivering multimedia content over wireless networks.

The company's joint partner in Verizon Wireless, Vodafone, has been joining Verizon for LTE field tests in the United States, Hungary, Germany, and Spain; and Verizon expects to expand the tests in the US with its fresh 700 MHz spectrum. To spur development, the company also announced the Verizon LTE Innovation Center in Waltham, Massachusetts which will serve as a sort of think-tank for creating "non-traditional products" for LTE use.

Alcatel-Lucent has formed a non-traditional consortium of its own, announced this week. Called ng Connect, the project teams Alcatel-Lucent, Samsung, and HP with more "outside the box" companies like pop culture social network Buzznet, Wi-Fi alarm clock maker Chumby, and lyric-synchronized media player TuneWiki. The consortium seeks to create a seamless steaming media environment which will exploit not only IMS that Verizon has chosen, but also service aware IP networks like IP/MPLS.