Amsterdam, 10 June 2014 – The organisers of LTE World Summit have today announced the shortlist for this year’s Telecoms.com LTE Awards. The LTE World Summit serves as a setting for the awards, which reward key successes and innovations across the LTE ecosystem. This year’s awards include more categories than ever before, with the introduction of three new awards; Best VoLTE Innovation, Innovation in HetNet Development and NFV Innovation of the Year.

Taking place at the De Duif in Amsterdam, the awards ceremony will bring together the experts responsible for driving LTE developments over the past 12 months. Considered a mark of industry excellence, the awards are judged by a panel of senior analysts from around the globe.

The line-up this year includes; Alan Quayle, Owner of Alan Quayle Business and Service Development; Zahid Ghadialy, Managing Director, eXplano Tech Limited; Alan Hadden, President at Global Mobile Suppliers Association; Ian Gillott, President, iGR; Stéphane Teral, Principal Analyst, Infonetics; Dimitris Mavrakis, Principal Analyst at Informa Telecoms & Media; Neil Wiffen, Principal Consultant at Red Banana Wireless Limited; Monica Paolini, Founder and President of Senza Fili Consulting; Phil Kendall, Director Global Wireless Practice, Strategy Analytics; and Ken Rehbehn, Principal Analyst, Yankee Group Research.

Awards judge and President of Global mobile Suppliers Association (GSA), Alan Hadden says: “The Telecoms.com LTE Awards celebrates the most noteworthy, technological innovations of the past year and the people, technology and organisations that made it happen. The entries this year reflect how the industry has exceeded in terms of creativity and forward thinking. It is certainly an exciting event to be a part of.”

The awards ensure global industry recognition for those shortlisted. Congratulations go to this year’s shortlisted companies, which can be found at http://lteawards.com/2014-shortlist/.

Supporting words from some of the shortlisted companies:

“Orange ambition is to be the leading carrier offering the widest connectivity and interoperability associated with retail quality of service, and we are looking towards LTE technology to achieve that. At Orange we are improving the service to our customers by speeding up the expansion of their roaming footprints. LTE Signalling is a key element of this and forms part of an integrated suite of services including testing, roaming hub and constant destination opening. Being on the LTE Awards shortlist is recognition from industry experts of the quality of our service and of course, it’s terrific exposure for Orange LTE Signalling.”

Cedric Gonin, Director Marketing Strategy and Development, Convergence and Mobile Services, Orange

“NetNumber is honored to be a finalist for this prestigious award. We are pleased NetNumber TITAN is recognized as an innovative NFV infrastructure for reducing complexity in the network core.”

Brad Boston, President and CEO, NetNumber

“We are honored by the recognition from Telecoms.com and our peers. Our continued focus on innovation is a testament to our relentless engineers who do what it takes to help our customers and partners succeed.”

Ronny Haraldsvik, CMO, SpiderCloud Wireless 

"The nomination for the LTE Awards once again confirms Vodafones innovation power. We brought LTE to customers throughout Germany as the first network operator and we already do offer speeds of up to 225 Megabit per second in selected locations. With LTE broadcast we are now once again one step ahead and show how to use innovative multimedia services via LTE in the future. The fact that the jury shortlisted our efforts for the prestigious international LTE Awards is a great honour for us."

Arash Ashouriha, Chief Network Officer, Vodafone Germany

“Because the award comes from Telecoms.com – an organization respected by service providers and enterprises alike, we believe it will be an important vehicle for service providers responding to the exponential growth in LTE Diameter traffic. Expected to reach nearly 99 million messages per second by 2017, this is a challenge on which many Oracle customers are now focused. We appreciate that Telecoms.com recognizes the importance of Diameter Signalling Controllers in supporting the tens of millions of concurrent sessions and hundreds of millions of subscribers and devices now connecting over LTE networks.”

Douglas A. Suriano, VP, Products, Oracle Communications

"It’s an outstanding achievement for Polystar to be commended by independent judges - industry recognition is hard-earned and highly valued. For us, being shortlisted for the Telecoms.com LTE Award is a significant endorsement of our strategy and our ability to deliver excellence.”

Inna Ott, Director of Marketing, Polystar Group

"We are honoured to be shortlisted for two Telecoms LTE Awards for the second year in a row. Both nominations are endorsement recognition of our technology and market leadership," said Mate Prgin, president and CEO of Avvasi. "The number of mobile devices streaming OTT video has reached an all-time high, and mobile network providers are facing a number of challenges and opportunities. Q-VUE and Q-SRV are leading solutions that help them better understand and manage OTT video QoE."

Mate Prgin, President and CEO, Avvasi

“We’re pleased that AirMagnet Spectrum ES has been selected as a finalist in Telecoms.com LTE Awards. As the industry’s first automated classification and location of RF interference sources, Spectrum ES helps carriers verify and troubleshoot at every stage of the project lifecycle. This award validates our approach and offers carriers an objective assessment of a solution that offers significant benefit.”

Dilip Advani, director of Product Marketing, Fluke Networks

“We are very excited that our Mobile Backhaul Solution has been short listed for this award.  The focus we’ve had on leading with an IP based portfolio has led to great traction in the marketplace. We are also pleased to share our story of continued innovation in addressing newer technologies and architectures.  This awards program demonstrates that the industry has taken notice of our success.” 

Heidi Adams Sr. Director for Product Marketing, Alcatel-Lucent

“Citrix ByteMobile is already recognized as an industry-leading brand in the category of video optimization and traffic management. We expect to be able to better serve our current and future customers by ensuring that, as operators begin to virtualize their networks, they will be able to continue to reap the subscriber QoE and network efficiency benefits of Adaptive Traffic Management.”

Chris Koopmans, Vice President and General Manager, Service Provider Platforms, Citrix

"Samsung Networks has been a long-time participant at the LTE World Summit and has enjoyed success at the LTE Awards in the past. We continue to push the boundary of mobile network capabilities and this innovation has resulted in many world firsts - our commercialized eMBMS solution among them. eMBMS is a new LTE technology that enables operators to make efficient use of their spectrum while offering an enhanced media consumption experience to their users. Being shortlisted for the 2014 LTE Awards is an important point of recognition and validation for us, and proves that we are on the right track to contribute to the successful growth of this industry."

Sam Baker, Vice President of Marketing, Networks Business, Samsung Electronics

"We are laser focused on enabling mobile operators to extend their Voice over LTE services beyond the consumer market, to the Unified Communications services their business market segment customers are demanding.  At BroadSoft we have the only VoLTE compliant business telephony application server and we are excited to have been shortlisted for this prestigious award."

Leslie Ferry, Vice President, Marketing, BroadSoft

“VoLTE is a key topic in the LTE industry in 2014 and one that enjoys a particular important status at Siemens CVC. Being short-listed or even winning the “Best VoLTE product” award is a sign of recognition for Siemens CVC that underlines our focus and market position in this area and motivates us even more to develop the best solutions in class. Our LTE portfolio offers valuable products and solutions that meet telco operators’ latest challenges with solutions tailored to their specific needs. The short-listed innovation, Cross-Site Session Binding, resolves a relevant issue of VoLTE deployments, which has proven to be key to our customers and successfully addresses a real pain point of telco operators.”

Alberto Diez, Technical Product Manager, Siemens Convergence Creators

“Being shortlisted for this award validates Amdocs’ independent, vendor-agnostic approach to SON. Amdocs and our operator customers see a strong need for vendor- agnostic solutions which focus on maximizing the performance of existing network infrastructure and improving the customer experience.”

Neil Coleman, Director of Marketing, Amdocs

“We are extremely pleased to be shortlisted in the Best LTE Backhaul Solution, Most Innovative LTE Application/Service and Best LTE Roaming/IPX Product categories for 2014 Telecoms.com LTE Awards. GENBAND is committed to bringing innovative real time communications solutions to market that are designed to help our customers improve their networks’ security, performance and efficiency.”

Brad Bush, Chief Marketing Officer, GENBAND

“We are extremely pleased to have our efforts recognized by being shortlisted at the industry’s leading awards, especially as we approach the one-year anniversary of our launch of LTE-Advanced. At SK Telecom, we believe that telecommunications technology can help advance the quality and simplicity of our lives. We will continue to strive to provide our customers with the absolute best service possible by deploying the world’s latest and most innovative LTE network technology.”

Park Jin-hyo, Senior Vice President and Head of Network Technology R&D Center, SK Telecom

“LTE is spurring unprecedented innovation as operators leverage its inherent flexibility to launch a range of new services. The Telecoms.com LTE Awards get to the heart of the most important advancements being made to push LTE forward. Vasona Networks is honored to be recognized alongside so many breakthrough technologies and companies for our work in helping to manage all of the new traffic that is traversing these networks.”

Biren Sood, CEO, Vasona Networks

“PRISMA is already present in the majority of Infrastructure Manufacturer R&D labs worldwide. The relevance of load and stress over the radio interface for LTE/LTE-A is now prompting many mobile Operators to look to the outstanding multi-terminal solution developed by PRISMA. For PRISMA, this Award would be effective to gain further visibility and appreciation coming from the industries who follow the LTE World Summit and the LTE Awards, two events which are renowned and highly esteemed worldwide.”

Paolo Marini, VP, Business Development, PRISMA Engineering

"We are delighted to be shortlisted for the LTE Award category, Best LTE Roaming/IPX Product.  SAP Mobile Services is committed to driving innovation that helps our customers succeed and evolves the mobile ecosystem.” 

Sethu M. President, SAP Mobile Services