Photos: A look inside France Telecom's Boston R&D labs

IP conferencing, Widgets for mobiles and WLAN-to-GSM roaming

Here's an exterior view of France Telecom's Boston research and development lab, one of the company's 14 labs worldwide. The R&D operation employs a total of 4,200 researchers, 15 of whom are located here in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

France Telecom is pushing R&D as a way to boost innovation and beat its competitors. It plans to raise its R&D budget - currently about €600m or 1.5 per cent of France Telecom's turnover - by 50 per cent from 2005 to 2008.

All photos: Sylvia Carr

This quote represents the type of far-reaching research the lab aims to conduct.

Eric Dufresne, MD of the France Telecom Boston R&D Lab, said: "We're not trying to deliver standard products but investigate new and emerging technologies."

At the same time, the researchers' work is guided by what France Telecom's customers want.

Dufresne said: "We're very focused on what the customers expect from us - to do the right thing. We need to understand our customers' needs."

One of the areas the Boston lab focuses on is voice over IP (VoIP) for the enterprise.

Here Clement Lizhtenauer of France Telecom-owned Equant demonstrates how, with the company's Business Everywhere product, one can place a VoIP call while simultaneously sending a large file and videoconferencing to a colleague - and the quality of the voice transmission does not degrade significantly.

During the teleconference, we speak with Equant employees in Chile, France and London. The man shown in the large, centre section of the screen is calling from a softphone on his laptop, and is connected to the VPN from a Wi-Fi network in a Paris airport. The sound quality and frame rate were pretty impressive.

This screenshot shows how the Business Everywhere software prioritises data traffic based on what's needed to ensure high-quality communications. The red line is voice data, the blue line a file and the green line is video.

France Telecom is keen to expand the types of services offered on its Orange-branded mobiles. To this end, the Boston R&D lab worked with the Mozilla Foundation to create an open-source mobile browser called Minimo, which runs on any Windows CE-based device and is still in alpha.

The lab is now developing a 'Widgets for mobiles' scheme - much like the Widgets for the Mac OS - whereby third-party developers can easily create simple applications such as currency converters or world clocks for mobile devices.

Here Brenda Belleville, director of marketing for Equant North America, shows off a widget which allows for the easy tracking of packages online from a Minimo-powered device.

France Telecom also demoed technology which allows mobile phones to seamlessly roam between WLAN and GSM networks, a project still under development at the labs.

Here you see fellow journalists moving through the halls of the lab to test the service on the Motorola phones provided for us.