Nov. 4, 2009 (PR Newswire) -- BASKING RIDGE, N.J., and DALLAS, Nov. 4 /PRNewswire/ -- From the LTE Americas 2009 Conference, Tony Melone, Verizon Wireless senior vice president and chief technology officer, said in his keynote this morning that Verizon Wireless' commitment to network leadership is elementary as it rolls out the nation's first 4G Long Term Evolution (LTE) wireless network, and that this leadership commitment extends to "fostering global collaboration and enabling the broader ecosystem needed to exploit the capabilities of a great network." Melone's full remarks may be found at www.verizonwireless.com/lte.

He noted his company's belief that "4G is much more than the sum of higher bandwidth and lower latency. It's really about embedding broadband wireless into the typical consumer's life - and it's about embedding broadband wireless into the basic functions of business and industry.

"We believe the combination of our aggressive deployment and our single-frequency footprint will attract premium partners and make Verizon Wireless the first place that device and applications developers come to sell their products, and ultimately, the first place that customers come to for their 4G services," Melone said.

He emphasized that "we can't just wait and let these expectations unfold - we need to drive it," and that's why in addition to building one of the first 4G LTE wireless networks on the globe, Verizon Wireless is taking a proactive approach to fuel this ecosystem of innovation through many collaborative initiatives, including:

    --  Open Development - Established to help third-party developers create and
certify devices to run on the company's network.