Somera
Communications, Santa Barbara, California
Somera works with a wide range of customers, from the emerging service
provider who is rapidly building out their network, to the established
operator seeking to enhance network efficiencies, increase capacity, or
introduce a next generation technology.
Provide leadership of a team of wireline, wireless and data engineers to
assist in the selling, procurement, testing, and hardware
reconfiguration process and provide technical support to Sales and
Procurement teams.
Provided technical leadership for testing and configuration of Ericsson
RBS-884 and Nortel Networks TDMA cell sites in the newly established
Regional technology center in Brazil for redeployment to international
customers.
Provided technical leadership for the creation of Nortel test bed in the
Technical Operations center which allowed Somera to be able to provide
end to end testing on Nortel products, including call-through testing.
AT&T Wireless, Redmond, WA
Projects included "Lift" of existing Network
Elements, Replacement of CDMA network acquired by AT&T system in San
Diego with a TDMA solution, Gateway MSC design and deployment in the
largest MSA, New York City, Initial planning and design of AT&Ts core
network elements for their 3G network.
"Lift" of existing TDMA network
elements
This consisted of replacing MSCs and cell sites
with a Nortel solution in California, Nevada and Washington state. All
activities were performed on a live network and in many cases involved
re-home of cell sites from one state o MSCs in a neighboring state.
As Network Engineering Manager for Nortel Networks Wireless
Engineering, My responsibilities included but were not limited to
managing all engineering functions, planning meetings, daily, weekly and
periodic status meetings, hardware configuration and provisioning, trunk
provisioning both PSTN and cell site requirements based on forecasted
traffic and AT&T diversity guidelines.
Replacement of CDMA network with a
Nortel TDMA Solution
This project consisted of the replacement of
Qualcomm’s CDMA digital network serving more than 200,000
subscribers with, as the news reported "
AT&T's
competing, and incompatible, digital technology called TDMA."
Managed the hardware engineering, trunk provisioning and planning for
the interim solution for converting from CDMA to TDMA using AMPS
wireless protocol to provide analog service during the conversion phase,
see news
story.
Conversion was completed successfully with the
major disruption being the analog only operation experienced during the
actual cut from the CDMA to TDMA systems, as reported by the
San
Diego Metropolitan news report.
Gateway MSC design and deployment in
New York City and New Jersey
This project consisted of traffic study of the
New York City's wireless traffic for AT&Ts network serving New York City
and New Jersey, designing and deploying a mobility gateway pair of MSCs
to increase overall network capacity by reducing mobility overhead on
existing MSCs. This architecture was designed to simplify design
provisioning and maintenance that is inherent in a fully meshed network
with the use of a hierarchical network approach. The initial phase of
the project lasted two years from inception to in-service.
See News clip of Nortel's contract award:
BCP Cellular Recefe, Brazil:
In August of 1997 A consortium headed by BellSouth Corp. and the Safra
Group, of Brazil, won a license to provide cellular service in a
six-state region in Brazil with a population of more than 25 million.
I was assigned to the project in November 1997 as Systems Engineering
Manager with a mandate to staff and manage the network engineering
functions to meet an in-service date of April 1998 and go-live date of
June 1 1998.
From a green-field state covering six states with no switch sites
selected and fewer than 20 cell site acquisitions, the first live call
was made on April 1, 1998 and all PSTN testing and integration
completed to meet the
in-service date of June1.
Engineering and provisioning the "B" band TDMA all-digital
IS-136 network that comprised a Nortel DMS-MTX in each of the six state
was complicated by the fact that hardware were pre-provisioned in order
to be manufactured and shipped to Brazil and meet stated deadlines.
Hardware provisioning and configuration had to be redone to adhere to
customer's call model and subscriber requirements.
