Forward-looking ideas

Deutsche Telekom is investing in the development of forward-looking technologies and making these available to its customers in products and services.

T-City future lab
T-City is a joint project between the city of Friedrichshafen and Deutsche Telekom. This partnership, which is the only one of its kind in the world, enables people to experience technologies of the future and demonstrates what state-of-the-art ICT can achieve: a better quality of life for residents and location advantages for the city’s businesses. Up until 2012 innovative products and services designed to make life and work even easier, more convenient and more interesting for the city’s residents will be developed and put to the test in Friedrichshafen.

So that this all works smoothly, in 2007 Deutsche Telekom installed state-of-the-art broadband infrastructure in Friedrichshafen within just a few months. The T-City future lab will act as a model for other regions in Germany and Europe, providing important inputs for economic and social development. Magyar Telekom is already planning a second T-City in Hungary.

Deutsche Telekom Laboratories
Deutsche Telekom Laboratories are Deutsche Telekom’s central research and development institute. At their main location in Berlin, Deutsche Telekom’s own experts and researchers from the Technische Universität Berlin work together on products and solutions that will enable the simple, fast and secure communication of the future. A new project office opened early in 2009 in Silicon Valley, California.

Another subsidiary institute is located in the Negev desert in Israel. In cooperation with the Ben Gurion University, it mainly conducts research into security in telecommunications networks. The Deutsche Telekom Laboratories have registered over one hundred patents since their establishment in 2005. Many ideas have now been adopted in practice. These include a solution for WLAN usage in Deutsche Bahn’s InterCity Express (ICE) trains.

Innovative technology
The technology of the future can do both: protect the environment and give users optimum convenience. There is a good example of this from T-Home: Together with well-known partners, T-Home developed an innovative hybrid fuel cell system that can supply energy to public telecommunications systems with absolutely zero emissions. The system runs on solar energy and a hydrogen fuel cell. Energy generation gives off only water and heat – no CO2.

The climate-friendly telephone and multimedia station is particularly suited to mobile use, e.g. events or large-scale gatherings, when the existing communications infrastructure requires fast and flexible expansion. The new development was one of the few to win an award in the “Green IT” category at the Initiative Mittelstand innovation awards, an SME initiative.