French-US telecom equipment maker Alcatel-Lucent announced a joint venture with Japanese group NEC on Tuesday to develop ultra-high-speed mobile phone technology. The joint company will work on building phone infrastructure to the LTE (Long Term Evolution) norm that will allow high-speed transfer speeds for mobile phones around the year 2010 that are equivalent to broadband Internet. This fourth generation technology, capable of data transfer speeds of 1 megabyte a second, is expected to spur development of mobile television, interactive games and email.

NEC is very strong in its home market. Alcatel-Lucent is present in the United States and Europe but has not penetrated the dynamic Japanese market.