By: Becky Bracken

Innovation isn’t just a science—it’s an art. You can’t force it and you can’t demand it from your employees, but in the communications technology space it’s what separates the winners from the losers in very short order. From the old Ma Bell rotary phones to today’s most advanced self-organizing networks, great strides have been made thanks to good old-fashioned research and development.

Innovation incubators are the lifeblood of telecommunications companies, whose labs are tasked with creating the next game-changing technologies. The work being done at incubators such as Telefónica’s Wayra technology-accelerator project and Siemens Canada’s smart-grid center of competence (COC) reveals not only where the juggernauts of telecom currently stand but, more importantly, where they plan to stake their future claims, helping to inform the industry as a whole about what lies just over the horizon.

Advancing 4G LTE

As environments “where companies large and small can come to rapidly prototype and bring to market their solutions that use the 4G LTE network,” according to spokeswoman Debra Lewis, the Verizon Innovation Centers strive to “encourage collaboration and advance the 4G LTE ecosystem while providing companies who work with us access to the best testing, development and human resources [i.e., engineers] possible to create or polish a solution.”

Through its Innovation Program, Verizon has worked on projects like VGo robotic telepresence, which replicates a person’s communication and movement in a second location via telerobotics. This technology is a powerful tool for doctors and others in the healthcare industry, who can now physically treat patients in the most remote parts of the world, while in San Antonio, Texas, an eight-year-old girl who’s homebound due to a delicate immune system uses VGo to attend school with other third graders.

Another breakthrough from the Verizon Innovation Program is Golden-i. Kopin Corporation’s voice-controlled headset computer is proving to be invaluable to police, firefighters and paramedics because of its real-time, situation-specific awareness—its infrared camera can “see through walls,” for example, per Golden-i’s website—and wearable, hands-free accessibility. It also lets first responders record incidents for review at a later date and watch simultaneous video feeds from other Golden-i devices.

“Our Innovation Centers were conceived well before our 4G LTE network was launched,” says Debra Lewis, adding that as “we continue to work on wireless technology,” Verizon is also investing time and energy in near-field communication (NFC), telematics and more.

More capacity for less

At AT&T the demand for mobile internet increased a staggering 30,000 percent across its network from 2007 to 2012, according to Kris Rinne, the company’s senior vice president of architecture and planning. “To help meet this demand, we have laid out a forward-thinking plan called Project Velocity IP, or Project VIP, which aims to build the best intelligent global network in the world,” with AT&T “investing $14 billion over the next three years to significantly expand and enhance our networks, both wireless and wireline.”

A major component of the communications service provider’s (CSP) three-year plan involves adding 40,000 small cells and more than 1,000 distributed antenna systems (DAS) to its network. “We are a leader among carriers in deploying small-cell technology,” Rinne says. “We have already successfully trialed and deployed small-cell technology in a neighborhood application, in an enterprise setting and, most recently, in a high-rise business setting in New York City.”