“We have to extend beyond cellular”, says Verizon spokesperson

US carrier Verizon should think of itself as a hub for all internet connectivity and not just a service provider, the company said to an audience at the Broadband World Forum on Tuesday. Aparna Khurjekar, executive director of business solutions group at Verizon said: “We could be providing a gamut of services that could be supported by Verizon and monetising them. You have to extend beyond cellular.”

Khurjekar, speaking at the Connected Verticals Summit co-located at the Broadband World Forum in Paris, referred to a wide range of in-car connectivity services that she said the operator could deliver.

These included creating “intelligent transportation”, that could help to dramatically reduce the rate of road crashes, which Khurjekar said stood as occurring every five seconds in the USA, with a fatality every five minutes.

This technology would be based on Discrete Short range Comms operating at 5.9GHz and using 75MHz of bandwidth, giving a data radius of 1000 metres.

Khurjekar also said that 25 per cent of driving time in the US was spent in traffic and that connected technology could help reduce congestion by 70-80 per cent helping to improve the economy through increased productivity time.

Other examples of connected in-car uses would be Vehicle to Device, with embedded LTE enabling new forms of in-car entertainment such as Netflix streamed directly to screens in the back seats.

Responding to the question of who would pay for the infrastructure to enable much of the technology Khurjekar stated that, “there has to be some investment coming from the government”.

Verizon will be speaking at the LTE North America 2011 conference which takes place on the 8-9 November 2011 at the Fairmont Dallas Hotel in Dallas, Texas, USA.