On March 7, 1876 – barely a decade after the end of the Civil War – Alexander Graham Bell was granted patent #174765, which was for a potentially useful item called the telephone. AT&T says it was born on that day as well and celebrated by touting its technology achievements in a blog post.
Since then, AT&T Labs solely invented or contributed to the invention of the transistor and the development of long-distance calling, satellite communications, and the cellular phone system. The carrier helped pave the way for radio, television and sound movies. It designed UNIX, helped launch the 911 emergency system and more, the company said.
The carrier has more than 11,000 active patents and averages three more each day. It has been awarded more than 1,000 security related patents and its engineers and scientists have won 14 Nobel Prizes.
A blog post written by senior vice president and network CTO Igal Elbaz highlights the carrier’s innovation.
“Did you know that by using machine learning algorithms, we have enabled cell sites to ‘sleep’ just like how your computer reserves power by entering rest mode when not in use?” Elbaz wrote. “Last year, AT&T saved the equivalent annual power use of 13,500 average homes by implementing this cell site sleep technology.”
Separately, AT&T pointed to work it had done for the U.S. Air Force in its Enterprise Information Technology-as-a-Service (EITaaS) program as an example of its capabilities.
The mandate was to upgrade and modernize networking services across Buckley Space Force Base, Colorado (Buckley); Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, Alaska (JBER); and Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska (Offutt). At each of these bases, AT&T is delivering Wide Area Networking, Base Area Networking, 5G, and FirstNet. This week, the company said that 5G service had been installed at Buckley.
The carrier says that moving into the future will require a network that is virtualized, intelligent, secure and customer-centric.
AT&T also is looking to help the environment. In August 2021, AT&T Business said that would lead its business customers to cut 1 billion metric tons (1 gigaton) of greenhouse gas emissions by 2035.
