Photo tour: Sprint’s Mobile Technology Lab

Next up on our virtual tour of Sprint’s headquarters could very well be the most interesting facility yet — the Mobile Technology Lab, which is located on Sprint’s main campus here in Overland Park, Kansas. This massive facility houses 50,000 square feet of lab space, 360 tons of cooling equipment, and once a current upgrade project is completed it will contain a total of 15 miles of coaxial cable and 5 miles of fiber. Whereas the Sprint Technology Integration Center is focused on network testing, this monstrous lab focuses on device testing. The facility allows Sprint engineers to test nearly every imaginable aspect of a device that might concern Sprint, from battery and audio quality to monitoring and logging software events during a limitless number of usage cases. The photo tour begins with another RF chamber; this one is an anechoic isolation chamber that keeps all signals out to ensure that tests are not impacted by outside radio waves. The second room you see is actually a dual-walled isolation chamber that takes this concept a step further. The tests performed here can be so sensitive that even the monitoring equipment could ruin them. As a result, the test equipment is positioned outside the first door and then sealed off with the second. You’ll also see a set of three dials immediately after the double door chamber, and these actually control the amount of signal fed into the chamber. So, for example, Sprint engineers are able to see how devices operate with weak 3G signal, or even take performance readings as 4G signal drops and the device jumps to 3G. Finally, the gray head pictured is part of an audio quality test setup — we were not allowed to photograph the monitoring station — and the small room at the end is home to a station that tests devices’ ability to play various kinds of multimedia files. As we’re sure you’re beginning to understand at this point, handsets and other connected devices undergo extremely rigorous testing ahead of release… and the tastes you’re getting here are barely the tip of the iceberg.