For years, Sprint’s Advanced Technology Laboratories have been off-limits to the general public. On Monday, Sprint gave us unprecedented access to their research and development complex, as they unveiled their new M2M Collaboration Center.
The new center, located just south of San Francisco, inside Sprint’s west-coast ATL facility located in Burlingame, will serve as an innovation center to aid in creating, testing, and approving Sprint M2M communications.
Read more for photos of the entire center, including ribbon cutting and technology demos.
Sprint’s M2M Collaboration Center is designed to allow for device makers to test their equipment in carrier-grade testing environments. In addition to a video teleconference center, the center offers developers private testing facilities that allow for protection of intellectual property, while giving engineers the same tools that Sprint uses to approve M2M equipment on their network.
Below you will see several technology demos, most of which are self-explanatory. Feel free to ask questions in the comments.
One demo that is a bit hard to explain, but impressed us, was the I2C Technologies demo above. The two photos above represent that the security camera array was able to read that text (in the first of the two photos) from across the room.
More importantly however, it was able to record and zoom in on that in real time, and relay it over WiMAX via MJPEG/MPEG-4, to a PC shown in the second photo. Sprint says that the multi-camera array allows for all of those cameras to operate over WiMAX and remotely record simultaneously, though we didn’t have a chance to ask if multiple WiMAX links were being used.
WOW, that looks pretty sad. I think they spent more money on the exec boardrooms on the O. P. Campus.
The conference center actually was nicely done, we didn’t get many photos because it was a packed room and our DSLR’s flash would have blinded more than a few executives.
As to the labs… well, they’re spartan for a reason. It’s certainly quite a facelift from the 25-year-old building photos we saw in the before-and-after (sorry, we don’t have those to show).