In a room with no cell service, Verizon works on the future of mobile

If you think your house has bad cellular coverage, Verizon Wireless has you beat: A small, windowless room high up in a San Francisco office building gets no service at all.

The room with zero bars is in the heart of the Verizon Innovation Center, where Verizon network and business experts help developers of new wireless devices and apps to turn their ideas into products. The center opened there about two years ago, setting up shop in a hotbed of startup activity in the tech-heavy Bay Area. The tiny lab lets product developers test out how their devices or apps will work in different situations, such as strong network signals near a cell tower, weak coverage at the edge of the cell, and even traveling at high speed through a certain type of network, Gagan Puranik, associate director of Verizon's innovation centers, said. All these can be simulated in the sealed room, using Verizon's regular frequencies, because the signals from Verizon's commercial network can't interfere there, he said. The carrier started the Innovation Center to help create an ecosystem that would drive usage of its LTE network, which now carries about 60 percent of Verizon's mobile traffic, according to Verizon Executive Vice President and CTO Tony Melone.