AT&T Labs

AT&T Labs, Inc.

Type	Private (Subsidiary of AT&T)
Industry	Research & Development
Founded	1988
Headquarters	Austin, Texas Bedminster, New Jersey Middletown, New Jersey Warrenville, Illinois
Website	www.att.com/labs

AT&T Labs, Inc. is the research & development division of AT&T. It employs some 1800 people in various locations, including: Bedminster NJ; Middletown, NJ; Manhattan, NY; Warrenville, IL (Integrated Test Network); Austin, TX; Atlanta, GA; San Francisco, CA; San Ramon, CA; and Redmond, WA (Mobility Test Center). AT&T Labs – Research, the 450-person research division of AT&T Labs, is based in the Bedminster, Middletown, San Francisco, and Manhattan locations.

AT&T Labs traces its history from AT&T Bell Labs. Much research is in areas traditionally associated with networks and systems, ranging from the physics of optical transmission to foundational topics in computing and communications. Other research areas address the technical challenges of large operational networks and the resulting large datasets.

Achievements

Since its creation in 1996, AT&T Labs has been issued over 2000 US patents. Researchers at AT&T Labs developed UWIN a package for running Unix applications on Windows; Graphviz, a graph visualization system; Natural Voices text-to-speech software; speech recognition software; E4SS (open source software for developing telecommunications services); very large databases; video processing software; and other useful open-source tools and libraries. The Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences (now operated by the OEIS foundation) is the creation of AT&T Researcher Neil Sloane.

Researchers at AT&T Labs have successfully transmitted 100 Gigabits per second over a single optical link. In 2009, AT&T researchers led the winning team in the Netflix Prize competition.

History

AT&T Laboratories, Inc., known informally as AT&T Labs, was founded in 1996, as a result of the split of AT&T Bell Laboratories into separate R&D organizations supporting AT&T Corporation and Lucent Technologies. Lucent retained the name Bell Labs and AT&T adopted the name AT&T Laboratories for its R&D organization.

AT&T Labs also traces its origin to Southwestern Bell Technology Resources, Inc. (SWB TRI) which was founded in 1988 as the R&D arm of Southwestern Bell Corporation. It had no connection to Bellcore, the R&D organization owned equally by all of the Baby Bells.^[1]

In 1995, Southwestern Bell Corporation renamed itself SBC Communications, Inc., resulting in the subsequent name changes of companies such as SWB TRI to SBC Technology Resources, Inc. (SBC TRI).

In 2003, SBC TRI changed its name to SBC Laboratories, Inc..^[2] SBC Laboratories focused on four core areas: Broadband Internet, Wireless Systems, Network Services, and Network IT.

In 2005, SBC Communications and AT&T Corporation merged to form AT&T. AT&T Labs, Inc. became the new name of the combined SBC Laboratories, Inc. and AT&T Laboratories along with its research facilities in New Jersey.

In 2006, BellSouth Laboratories was also merged with AT&T Labs. BellSouth Labs had offices in Birmingham, Alabama and Atlanta, Georgia.

References

1. SOUTHWESTERN BELL TELEPHONE CO Annual Report (Regulation S-K, item 405) (10-K405) ITEM 1. BUSINESS
2. AT&T - News Room, June 16, 2003

External links

• AT&T Labs Research