LONDON— Member companies of the ng Connect consortium, formed to aid the rapid deployment of broadband services based on Long Term Evolution (LTE) and other high bandwidth technologies, demonstrated at the recent IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC) conference in Dresden, Germany, live intercontinental transmission of a multi player game using LTE.

The game from ng Connect member FISHLABS (Hamburg, Germany), dubbed Powerboat Challenge, involves maneuvering powerboats around buoys and each other at high speeds.

ng Connect founder Alcatel-Lucent (Paris, France) provided the infrastructure for the end-to-end LTE networks that the game ran over. The participants say a powerful network like LTE network is needed to support the real-time transmission of the competitors' position data and the much more data-intensive physical values making the game feel more realistic.

The ng Connect Program is a multi-industry organization with 20 members including HP, Samsung, QNX, Atlantic Records, FISHLABS, Connect2Media and Kyocera Communications.

The demonstration was between players on the IEEE ICC booth in Dresden and ng Connect Program lab in Ottawa, Canada.

According to Derek Kuhn, Vice President, Emerging Technology and Media Group, Alcatel-Lucent, the demonstration "will translate into a whole new revenue stream for wireless operators in that they can capture the imagination of both the game developer community and avid multi-player gamers everywhere."

"Since the start of the ng Connect Program a few short months ago, members have been working hard together to create exciting applications for next generation networks. FISHLABS and Alcatel-Lucent collaborated to create a much more compelling multi-player gaming experience taking users far beyond downloading a simple mobile game and playing alone."

Alcatel-Lucent supplied the end-to-end transmission network that integrates Converged Radio Access Network (RAN) and Evolved Packet Core (EPC), delivering super fast download speeds with reduced latency to prototype LTE terminals.

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