Portugal Telecom (PT) was formed in 1994 resulting from the merger of the three operator companies existing in Portugal. In 1999, the R&D department of Portugal Telecom became Portugal Telecom Inovação, a new company that inherited almost half a century of know-how in the development of telecom products and solutions.

The Portugal Telecom Group is the largest telecommunications and multimedia business organisation in Portugal. It offers a wide range of products and services at the level of the most advanced international companies in the sector, in which quality, diversification and innovation are decisive aspects.

The group dominates the market of local, long distance and international telephone services and the circuit rental service. It is also national leader in mobile phone services, paging, cable television, data communication, value added and television broadcasting.

In the last five years, PT has made the transition from a state-owned company to a private one, and 90 per cent of its shares are now owned privately. It has also gone from being a fixed network operator to an information, media and communications group that offers a wide range of services from fixed and mobile telecommunications to multimedia and contents and from business solutions to entertainment.

Rapid growth and diversification of business areas and markets are now the main strategic areas through which PT aims to create value for shareholders. As leader in the telecommunications sector, Portugal Telecom is one of the largest Portuguese companies quoted on national and international markets.

Portugal Telecom Inovação, SA, is the branch for research and Development in the Portugal Telecom Group. Fully owned and operated by PT and headquartered in Aveiro, the company also operates regional poles in Oporto and Lisbon having recently established a Brazilian subsidiary in São Paulo.

Formerly CET, this young company inherits the expertise gathered in 50 years of pioneering frontline activities in the telecoms business in Portugal, augmented with the knowledge base and resources of Marconi Labs (Lisbon) and Inesctel (Oporto) in 1999.

The main objective for PT Inovação is to participate in key projects as the leading group on knowledge areas of research, engineering and training, which are strategic for the development of the Portugal Telecom group’s business. This mission is met through the commitment to the promotion of the innovation process at both the service, technology and operations levels, so as to ensure competitiveness for the PT companies in both the domestic and the international market. The technological solutions developed by this organisation have proven essential in the internationalisation strategy of the PT Group. The company was a pioneer of the prepaid card technology innovating in what became famous brands as MIMO in Portugal, BABY in Brazil and MediJIHAZ in Morocco.

PT Inovação develops its activities around four main axis: Technology Studies and Applied Research; Technology Integration/Development of Telecommunications Solutions, Services and Systems; Engineering and Consulting Services; Technologies and Services training.

The skills and qualification of PT Inovação’s staff have enabled the acquisition and development of competence in such broad domains as Intelligent Networks (next generation/convergence approach), Access Networks, Multimedia and IP Solutions, Mobile Networks and Services, Business Intelligence (Network Analysis, Business Analysis, Customer Access, Self-provisioning), Network Management (specification, systems development, architectures and standards, management interfaces), IT Systems and Software Engineering as well as Telecommunications business processes.

The focus at PT Inovação is customer-orientated and always in line with the requirements of the various market segments. Technology and market drive the company’s actions, which are translated into projects of significant social and commercial impact by addressing fields as diverse as telework, telemedicine, distance learning, applications and services aiming at people with special needs, and digital communities initiatives.

During the last two decades, PT Inovação was responsible for most of the Portuguese representation in international telecommunications standards bodies (CEPT, ETSI, CCITT, ITU). The deep commitment to the promotion of co-operation with universities and other national and international R&D institutions has enabled PT Inovação to play a decisive role as an agent for the technological knowledge transfer between the market and the industry environments. Besides demonstrating the high capability of its engineering team, this active stance also accounts for the significant participation of PT Inovação in R&D programmes at both national and European level. PT Inovação has participated in CIÊNCIA, COST, RACE, ACTS, ORA, CTS, and ESPRIT programmes and, of course, in EURESCOM projects.

The operations of PT Inovação rely on a young staff of 300 persons, 70 per cent of which hold degrees in telecommunication and information systems engineering. Almost half of these engineers are less than 35 years old.

PT has been committed to EURESCOM's research work since the beginnings of the institute in 1991. This has lead PT Inovação to assume the role of project leader for the first time in project P226 – TMN Management of IN-based Services, followed by other projects on testing methodologies (P412), network computing technologies (P1005), IP VPNs (P1107) and access networks (P1117).

PT participation in recent EURESCOM projects has covered various technical areas such as voice technologies, open source, quality of service, optical and access networks, IP networking and evolution, middleware and internet technologies, e-commerce, mobile networks, usability, fraud and security, etc. The results achieved by these projects are used in PT Inovação’s effort to build innovative solutions for its customer companies operating in Portugal, Africa and Brazil. A special methodology for results dissemination has been set-up by PT Inovação and the PT Group so that the most promising research results are presented to the PT companies operating in the various telecom market segments.

In projects P923 BabelWeb and P1104 MUST the work performed by PT Inovação using its technological service development platforms has enabled the building-up of projects demonstrators for multilingual web services and multimodal service interfaces using small terminals (PDAs). Such work helped in proofing the concepts and guidelines developed in the projects and at the same time enabled an effective approach for presentation of innovative results on interactive voice and internet services.

PT Inovação is leading and participating in project P1117 FAN (Future Access Networks). The project aims at understanding and anticipating possible evolution scenarios towards an access solution that better fits the actual challenges related to the sustained growth of IP traffic compared to the legacy PSTN/ISDN (circuit switched) traffic, which is likely to stagnate or perhaps even decline in the coming years.

The IP area has been covered by the participation in several EURESCOM projects. In project P1006 Discman PT Inovação contributed with significant knowledge and experience in the area of IP QoS, through the practical evaluation of DiffServ implementations. More recently, this knowledge has been complemented by studies and experiments carried out in project P1107, lead by PT Inovação, in which advanced aspects of IP VPNs were addressed. This knowledge is currently used in the development of PT IP networks, being very important to produce recommendations, define test plans and also in the design and deployment phases of the real IP network.

At the same time PT Inovação has addressed other IP areas with its participation in EURESCOM projects. P1009 Armstrong and P1114 Mc-a-roni addressing, respectively, IPv6 and Multicast, allowed PT Inovação to participate in early experiments with these technologies. Due to this fact and to the participation in other R&D programmes (IST), PT Inovação is ready to integrate these technologies in its products and services and to help other PT companies start using them.

PT Inovação participates in studies and projects that are setting a common operator view on services and networks beyond 3G introduction in Europe. Both last year's P1145 and the ongoing P1203 project have been producing a common operator standpoint and vision-setting deliverables while promoting workshops to stimulate discussion and ensure operators develop a common strategic view on Next Generation fixed and mobile Networks.

PT Inovação has been an active promoter of the collaborative research attitude that made EURESCOM projects successful in sharing innovation risks and promoting the exchange of experiences and results in emerging technologies, pre-normative definitions, services and systems interfaces studies and in building strategic insight for PNO’s evolution.

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