Do this before the New year arrives.

In my last update, we talked about things to do during a #Telecoms #NetworkFreeze. One of those things was to prepare for the new year.

Here are things I’m thinking about as the New Year approaches. No particular order.
✅Prepare the New Year budget.
✅Have you identified recurring activities which can be automated?
✅Have you agreed on Goals and Objectives, #GNOs, for the people in your team individually, and for the team as a whole?
✅Do you have a plan in place to achieve each KPI your team will be measured by?
✅Can you speed Cost Containment projects, to realize the savings sooner?
Do you have a formal way, like a Dashboard, to track these KPIs?
✅Have you pre-populated your calendar with any special events, such as sports, conferences, political meetings, religious festivals

What’s the number 1 thing you’re thinking about preparing for the new year? Leave me a comment.

In my next message, I’ll talk about my #resolutions for 2019.

Follow me on LinkedIn, Russell Lundberg, for more updates, insights, tips, tricks, and tactics to love a career in Telecoms.

What do you do to stay warm in a freeze?

Yesterday we talked about the Network Freeze. Here’s a link to that discussion: https://lnkd.in/gU8kQQN

During a network Freeze, many of your coworkers are OOTO. The pace in the office might be a little slower. Fewer meetings, phone calls, emails; fewer interruptions.

There might be time to work on back-burner projects, or maybe not-yet-approved projects.

I like to work on automation, such as:

✅AWK one-liners, shell command pipelines, simple scripts.
✅Dashboards, license trackers, forecasting and modeling tools, what-if analyses.
✅If there’s a script I’ve been designing, this can be a good time to make progress on that.

Automation is always a win because it pays back a lot more than time savings.

This is also a good time to coach my team on non-technical tasks I routinely do. It helps them to develop their skills and lets me see who is farthest along.

Prepping to begin new year projects and budgets.

New year prep is a big enough topic that we’ll discuss it more tomorrow.

What things are you working on during this network freeze?

Follow me on LinkedIn, Russell Lundberg, for more updates, insights, tips, tricks, and tactics to love a career in Telecoms.

Does your network freeze over the holidays?

Many networks do. It’s common in Telecoms to freeze network changes during holidays.

During a Network Freeze, few maintenance activities are scheduled.

A freeze is smart when so many people are out of the office OOTO. Not only your own support staff but vendors and service providers, too.

Any outage caused by a planned maintenance activity is bad. But an outage worsened by a lack of support staff can really hurt your career. So don’t do that.

The freeze is announced by the Network Head weeks in advance and again when the freeze starts. Other departments know their pet projects won’t make progress in the network during the freeze.

A freeze covers major holidays: Christmas & NewYear, Ramadan; LunarNewYear; GoldenWeek in Japan; Songkran in Thailand; August in Europe. Any time many of the staff are OOTO.

During a network freeze, Technical staff works even harder than normal to avoid outages. Mostly by not messing with the kit.

What holidays cause your network to freeze? Leave me a comment with your freeze periods.

With so many people OOTO, the pace can seem a little slower. Tomorrow I’ll talk about how to keep warm during a freeze.

Follow me on LinkedIn, Russell Lundberg, for more updates, insights, tips, tricks, and tactics to love a career in Telecoms.

Are you following the progress of #eSIM?

I believe eSIM will be a significant change agent for the Mobile industry. I’ve posted many eSIMs updates.

I evaluated eSIMs for a client during 2018. We concluded that the time was not yet right to add an eSIM to the client’s product, and selected a traditional form factor instead.

At that time, I though eSIM would become mainstream within 12-18 months.

That was 9 months ago. And although progress is coming, resistance, primarily from MNO, continues to slow things down.

I recently spoke with Rune Holbech of Nordic eSIM. I wanted to better understand his view of the eSIM opportunity, and of the Nordic eSIM platform.

I was quite impressed with Rune’s knowledge and with the commercial penetration of Nordic eSIM. The eSIM platform space can expect to grow along with M2M and IoT and IIoT, so Nordic eSIM seems well-positioned as the industry matures.

Who do you follow to improve your understanding of eSIM?

👉Follow me on LinkedIn, Russell Lundberg,  for more updates, insights, tips, tricks, and tactics to love a career in Telecoms.

Here’s a problem 5G won’t solve

These are exciting times in Telecoms. Every day brings more information about new 5G technologies such as MIMO, mmWave, Network Slicing, and URLLC. Exciting use cases are described, such as private networks, Autonomous Cars, Neutral Host Networks, and EdgeComputing.

Although these are the things we read about, what exciting things have you worked on this week?

I didn’t think so.

It’s quite a paradox. The press is filled with the dazzling future just around the next corner, while our workdays are filled with routine maintenance, customer complaints, troubleshooting, budgets, and on and on it goes. Nothing very exciting.

But all necessary.

As Telecoms Engineers, we love to read about and talk about the new. Yet we should focus on things which improve service quality and lower costs. Things which develop our skills.

I like helping my team develop their skills. That’s more valuable to me and to them. I teach a lot about Excel because it can help with so many aspects of building and maintaining the network.

What do you do to develop your Telecoms skills? Leave me a comment with your best suggestions for Telecom Engineers skill development.

👉 If you like this, follow me on LinkedIn, Russell Lundberg, for more updates, insights, tips, tricks, and tactics to love a career in Telecoms.

Many Decry the Demise of Telecoms Network Operators

Many are decrying the demise of the #Telecoms #Network #Operator for failing to innovate or to succumb to Dumb Pipe Syndrome™. The asteroid ending the long reign of network operators has already impacted, apparently.

I don’t think the network operator business model has changed that fundamentally for a long time.

“Heretic” you cry. “Has Russell been smoking something recently decriminalized by California?” you snicker. “Has he not heard of 5G?”

Calm yourself. The sky falls not.

The Telecoms network operator business model has always been about balancing capital and operating expenses with the recurring subscriber revenue of those who use it.

Innovation is mostly lowering the cost structure or temporary first-mover advantages.

Do you see any fundamental change coming?

I’m carefully watching the open standards movement. Opening up interfaces might loosen the grip of vendors and allow smaller, more innovative players into the network.

It could help separate hardware from software, and potentially end the decennial forklift replacement of the network.

👉 If you like this, follow me on LinkedIn, Russell Lundberg, for more updates, insights, tips, tricks, and tactics to love a career in Telecoms.

I Delivered 5 Nines Uptime, and no one noticed!

You want to build your career while your building networks. I get that. Here’s a Pro Tip.

The last greenfield mobile network I built was a super experience on many levels, including my best-ever boss.

After service Launch, the CEO awarded Employee of the Year to the entire Engineering dept. for the startup effort.

When my boss accepted the award, he said this was the last he’d ever want to be in the spotlight. You see, he knew a dirty secret in #Telecom.

The best infrastructure is invisible: you only see it when it breaks.

This means your great work giving 5 nines uptime or better is ignored and you’ll only be “recognized” when there is an outage. Nice. Welcome to the Real World.

To grow your career you have to find other ways to impress the business. How? One of the best ways is to focus on Cost Containment.

Cost Containment usually means lowering a recurring (monthly) cost or generating more revenue for the same cost. It’s great for CSP finances and sure to win you positive attention.

Improving the cost structure while also maintaining great service is the #1 trick for Telecom Technologists to build your Telecoms career.

What are your tips for advancing your career in Telecoms technology?

👉 If you like this, follow me on LinkedIn, Russell Lundberg, for more updates, insights, tips, tricks, and tactics to love a career in Telecoms.

He had it made until he shot off his mouth.

Early in my Telecoms career, there was occasionally lots of overtime. I worked in a dial-for-dial cutover crew turning up new 1AESS switches in the PSTN and there were times when you could pick up some extra money by working more.

Union rules required time and a half pay and even double time pay for starting a shift early, staying late, or working weekends. Like most systems of rules, there were ways to game it.

Apparently, one employee had worked out a long-term deal which gave him a steady extra income. He bragged about how much he was making to one of his coworkers. Another employee overheard him, and complained to the union.

The union intervened because the overtime wasn’t being offered according to Seniority rules. So the overtime stopped cold.

The First level supervisor in my group just shook his head and said “9 times out of 10 craft cause their own problems by opening their big mouth. When you’ve got a good thing going, shut up.”

Have you ever blown a sweetheart deal by talking about it?

👉 If you like this, follow me on LinkedIn, Russell Lundberg, for more updates, insights, tips, tricks, and tactics to love a career in Telecoms.

A pro sports team’s new coach always says this

“We’re gonna work on fundamentals: blocking, tackling, passing the ball.”

As Telecom Pros, we love the shiny and new: 5G, mmWave, network slicing, #MIMO, URLLC, CRAN. OK, so we like acronyms, too.

But when the excitement of sexy new technology wears off, there’s still a mobile network to maintain. And what does that mean? Reports. Lots and lots of reports.

Dashboards, analyses, forecasts, budgets, financial models, capacity planning. Not very exciting. But this is how a modern mobile network is run.

For you, that probably means Microsoft Excel. Which is fine, because #Excel is not very exciting, either.

But it’s pretty much the best tool you’ve got for all those uses. You owe it to yourself to acquire a reasonable facility using Excel.

Check out this article: Dashboard Automation with GETPIVOTDATA. One simple technique to automate your Dashboards. And if you can automate all the mind-numbing manual updates you have to do now, it does more than free your time.

It frees your mind to think hard about what the data are telling you. You’ll have new insights and synthesize new possibilities.

Try it before you say “they’re only reports.” Because reports are a huge time sink. Get in front of it.

👉 If you like this, follow me on LinkedIn, Russell Lundberg, for more updates, insights, tips, tricks, and tactics to love a career in Telecoms.

Are you responding to Latency slowly?

Reduced latency is one of the key benefits often cited for 5G. Improved latency allows for new apps, new use cases, new revenue streams.

But I have so many questions. For 5G latency to be clearly better, we have to know what it’s better than.

Do you know the typical latency in your network now? What are the important latency metrics to monitor? Are you currently tracking 4G latency? 3G?

Do you aggregate latency test results by technology or spectrum? Does carrier aggregation need to be disabled to get meaningful results?

Do you produce an “average latency” figure for the network? Is there a latency dashboard of performance, bottom sites, trends?

Is latency improvement included in your RAN team’s yearly Goals & Objectives? Do you have a latency SLA? Do you report latency in BOD meetings?

How do you collect latency data? Some speed testing apps include latency measures. But those are manual tests. Is there an automated way to test, one which doesn’t add to your tech team’s Site Visit Checklist?

Does your vendor-provided OSS report useful latency data? Are there 3rd-party packages for determining end-to-end latency? Which do you like?

What suggestions do you have about network latency?

👉 If you like this, follow me on LinkedIn Russell Lundberg for more updates, insights, tips, tricks, and tactics to love a career in Telecoms.