Nokia Bell Labs’s 100th anniversary: balancing exploration and clear use cases fuels innovation

Analysys Mason attended Nokia Bell Labs’s 100th anniversary event at Murray Hill, New Jersey, USA, in April 2025. The centennial celebrations were a blend of cutting-edge technology demonstrations (on topics such as sensing, radio on glass, quantum computing, space communications and network AI) and details of the long, rich history of world-changing innovations at Bell Labs.

It was clear how telecoms-specific topics are feeding directly into the Nokia core telecoms business, but it was also valuable to see how more exploratory areas of research, such as quantum computing and space communications, were helping to support the technology leadership of both Nokia Bell Labs and Nokia’s core business.