Connecting a smartphone or a tablet to the web is as simple as subscribing to a mobile broadband plan, but many of the newer categories of devices that are hitting the market don’t have the luxury of a built-in baseband chip to interface with carrier networks. That is leading manufacturers toward alternative wireless options in an accelerating shift that Verizon Communications Inc. now hopes to reverse.

The telecom giant has unveiled a grandiose initiative to win back the connected universe that rests on a collaboration with key semiconductor makers to develop a new generation of embedded networking modules cheap enough for use in emerging end-points. One early prototype produced as part of the alliance is reportedly already below half the price point of current alternatives.

Verizon plans to keep pushing down the cost of adding LTE support until it becomes viable to individually link connected devices to its network. That would eliminate the current dependence on standalone routers that are relatively expensive to buy and configure, introduce more opportunities for failure and are outright impractical in many of environments where those end-points are being deployed, particularly the outdoors.

To top it off, the upcoming networking modules will also reduce the ongoing cost of transmitting data by sending packets not through Verizon’s mobile network but rather a dedicated transport lane for connected devices. That specialized infrastructure will use more or less the same LTE technology but offer much lower rates for sensors and other hardware that consumes too little bandwidth to justify the price of a regular subscription.

Developers will be able to take advantage of the data from those end-points using the third and final component of Verizon’s plan: A cloud-based platform called ThingSpace that promises to provide a managed environment for building applications to put the estimated 500 zettabytes of traffic that the connected universe is expected to generate by the end of the decade to use.

The main draw lies not so much in the development functionality itself as the fact that it’s integrated with administrative features that will allow organizations to control their connected devices and the traffic they produce from the same place. That’s a potentially invaluable convenience for large deployments with upwards of thousands of end-points to manage across multiple different geographic locations.

Photo via Hans