The 5G Open Innovation Lab near T-Mobile US’ headquarters in Bellevue, Washington, gained a quartet of additional founding partners today. Amdocs, Dell Technologies, Microsoft, and VMware, joined Intel, NASA, and T-Mobile to lead and financially support the lab as a second cohort of startups start cycling through the 12-week program.

As with most non-essential activities today, the COVID-19 crisis has precluded participants from collaborating together at the lab in person. The lab’s first wave of participants got underway in May 2020, and the lab is accepting applications for the third group of 15 to 20 startups that will join the program in spring 2021.

“These programs give entrepreneurs and developers direct access to T-Mobile engineers and business leaders to help them develop groundbreaking new 5G products. And we're seeing incredible work — innovations in autonomous drones and vehicles, holographic video, immersive [augmented reality] and [virtual reality] platforms for frontline workers, exciting wearables, as well as solutions for edge networks, enterprise, IoT, and so much more,” Neville Ray, president of technology at T-Mobile, said during a keynote at this week’s Big 5G Event.

“Our goal with these initiatives is to create economic value that goes well beyond traditional telecom using T-Mobile's powerhouse 5G network as the foundation. With 5G leadership, this country will be a global hub for innovation and investment, benefiting from a massive wave of growth in new technologies and services across all industries,” he said. “The stakes of this are high, and 5G will determine whether the next Google, Apple, Amazon, and Uber of the world is created here in the U.S. or abroad.”

5G labs are popping up all around the world with the implicit backing of operators and vendors that are banking on a surge in new revenue buoyed by technology innovation. AT&T and Verizon are also supporting labs that aim to develop new services riding on 5G, mobile edge computing, and industrial IoT.

Vendors and operators are still searching for and trying to assist in the development of specialized 5G use cases that will deliver on the yet-to-be-seen promise of 5G and its core capabilities. 

“With standalone 5G there’s an immediate coverage benefit, but this is also a platform for the future that will unlock many transformative applications. In standalone areas, our engineers are already seeing up to a 40% improvement in latency, and that’s just the beginning of what we can do with standalone 5G,” Ray said at this week’s event.

“Edge compute and network slicing standards are still evolving, but only T-Mobile is building a network that could deliver edge compute broadly. We're working to help fuel this 5G ecosystem, and drive innovation and development with a number of new initiatives,” he said. 

The second group of startups joining the lab cover a wide range of business opportunities in network automation, backhaul, artificial intelligence, analytics, edge computing, agriculture, and other sectors.

“The program is still using a virtual format due to COVID,” a T-Mobile spokesperson told SDxCentral. “The pandemic hasn’t slowed the lab down though, rather it has accelerated the need for 5G technologies that can increase automation and collaboration across remote workforces.”

While the lab’s backers aspire to develop various services and technologies, Ray has repeatedly highlighted wearables as a particularly exciting opportunity. The wearables space, especially applications that require 5G-delivered throughputs and lower latency, is opening up in industrial and consumer applications, he said. 

“It’s fascinating to me because a lot of that technology is out there already. … And now we’re in a position where we can pack all that technology together with a wireless network that gives you broad mobility and capability” to support new types of services, Ray said.

“I'm super hopeful and very confident the use cases will start to come through now in a meaningful way, both business and enterprise and on the consumer front, now that the networks are coming together,” he said.