Joe Phone-User will never see it, but underneath his bright, shiny iPhone 5 or Samsung Galaxy S3’s blazing fast 4G Long Term Evolution (LTE) data speed there’s a whole infrastructure world for developers to create new applications. The number two company in providing the LTE foundation is Alcatel-Lucent and they’re opening the doors to low-level developers by introducing a suite of application programming interfaces (APIs).

These nine Nine ‘New Conversation APIs’ are designed to give developers easy access to communication capabilities in service providers’ IP Multimedia Subsystem, the infrastructure that sits at the heart of 4G LTE and IP networks.

Specifically, Alcatel-Lucent claims that, “These capabilities include high definition voice and video, audio/video conferencing, interactive voice, messaging and call control, which can be used to build services for both consumers and businesses. … To jump-start the developer ecosystem Alcatel-Lucent is leveraging its ngConnect program, which brings together service providers and apps developers as well as offering easy access to the APIs, along with a fast prototyping environment provided by the New Conversation API developer portal. These APIs are based on REpresentational State Transfer (REST), a popular, easy-to-use software architecture used to create applications for the Web.”

Alcatel-Lucent opens the doors for 4G LTE programmers. More >