The Telecom Quartet
Folio II: Engieering Culture or Culture Engineer Folio
I Death of a Telecom Engineer The Perspective
of an Obituary The purpose of
writing this essay is to instruct myself. Nowadays, the art of writing for
self-instruction is not very fashionable but circumstantial pressure made me do
so. I have been trained as a Communication Engineer and recently got exposed to
those areas of telecom which are non-engineering in nature. The experience has
been very rewarding in terms of extending my perspective about linkages and
cross-linkages. I am of the opinion that human mind learns best when it learns
from known to unknown and experience is the best teacher. So I would try to
engage in instructing myself from the step with which I am familiar – the
engineering aspects of telecom and its adulterated affair with data which has
been a global gossip, thanks to the gossip mongering Internet and its
increasing popularity. But history teaches us a lesson, if it ever teaches
anything or we learn anything from it, is that all popular things may not necessarily be beneficial
for the populace. In more intense times, a hundred and fifty years ago, in Judging Telecom is not so easy
for those who live in our times. It is infinitely more difficult to tell what
is exactly going on. It is impossible to predict what will happen in the short
run even when we are not dead. In the long run, none knows as Professor Keynes
has said it all – In the long run, we are all dead. Our previous generation of
revolution has at least one solace that they knew either its apocalypse or
Utopia or something in between but in our case, we even don’t dare to tell what
will happen after say twenty years in our field. In this way, like me, who has
a six month old kid cannot even think of what he would be. It is frightening. It
is doubly frightening while we add up the situation looked from twenty years
ahead. We are told that we will be wrong, definitely, wide off the mark and
hence don’t even dare to say anything about it. My dear fellow, world is like that – it’s fast changing, only thing is
change and since all change will be beyond estimate, why bother to think?
This frightens me because if that is really the nature of things, then we are
condemned to a foreclosed memory. Vendors who perpetuate this doctrine of
change and if its technology and telecom, you have it, it has become an axiom,
the opening sentence, the sentence taken for granted. They sincerely forget one important aspect of human
cognition – human beings are best influenced by human beings compared to anything else. Revolutions, upheavals, change happen not on their own.
Human beings, consciously or unconsciously work for it. If this catastrophe of
foreclosed memory really happens, it will not happen on its own, it will be
self fulfilling prophecy and none will even recognize the prophet. The meaning of the word essay is
to try, however, true to the doctrine of change; meaning of this has also
changed. Internet like Houdini can provide customers with essays immediately.
You need only to type in the rectangular universe of google.
But I remember a very funny but profoundly serious idea of my friend Shomik who asks - if I write in that rectangular universe –
What is that which google does not know? Try this
yourself and after that please read on more carefully if you are a
communication engineer. The
Engineering Species – Crisis and Future Evolution As a communication engineer, I
anticipate some profound change is happening in our profession and some of our
colleagues feel this directly and some would feel it sooner or later.
Communication Engineers can be classified into four broad classes as per
functional work - designers, planners, operational, maintenance.
You design an idea, you plan an action, you operate a device and you maintain a
system or configuration. Designers and Planners are actually doing exactly the
thing which, in theory should make life easier for Operational and Maintenance
colleagues. This model, as we were perhaps
absent minded is no longer valid in the general framework where DPOM network operate. Let us start one
by one. I would try to lay in front of you my fears and then try to formulate
strategy to re-invent ourselves and our roles. Designers of previous times
considered bandwidth or capacity as a scared resource. Engineering schools
taught design excellence in terms of design where bandwidth is required least.
This is no longer true. The trend as some economists declares that in future,
bandwidth will be as abundant as air. The utilization of back-bone fibre
bandwidth vis-à-vis capacity is little more than 2 %. With broadband Internet
getting rolled out, this highly significant supply side will become an
interesting issue. But the greatest question from demand side is then usage
habit of Internet-users. With capacity enough to provide Video-Data and Voice,
unless some other sensory medium and its transportation is proposed and
deployed, supply will be overwhelmingly higher than demand. Since engineers are
not trained about people but prided in knowing the machines and systems better,
they are going to miss out the core of the Design issues as time rolls on. Here
comes the pre-ponderous sway of marketing and we all know we don’t like
marketing professionals that much. With due solidarity to our colleagues, it is
a fact, to be
recognized sooner than later that due to fundamental changes or revolutions, if you please, our greatest
competitive advantage in terms of machine-specialization has become our cause
of gradual or dramatic extinction, depending on how fast or slow the
distribution of bandwidth abundance flows into the network. The crux is that we
were not exposed to the concept, use and abuse of Cost and the economic magic
that is woven around it. Planners are more secure although
at a price. Earlier, planners could leverage on their special technical
knowledge about wires, network, poles, holes, cable, equipment, powering etc. Operational Engineers are the
colleagues who are terribly scared. They should be and they are because they
are sensible and intelligent. When I started my career in 1998 as a telecom
engineer, one of my seniors (now a General Manager in a leading Telco in India)
colleagues performed some pre-operational exercise on a LNA module (Low Noise
Amplifier which is used in receiving the satellite signal downwards and used to
amplify the weak signal before it is processed further) and it was as delicate
as an operation by a neurosurgeon. He worked delicately, frequently checking
dust and temperature of the room lest the sensitive equipment gets performance
variation. Nowadays solid-state LNA modules are like electric bulb in use and a
boy can fix it even! Internet has made Operational
issues more edge-intensive. Almost all IP level equipments can be remotely
operated upon and the best place is vendor‘s office and Internet makes it
globally identifiable. VoIP, if it succeeds like
success, lots of Switching Engineers can play badminton, if not cricket in the
rooms where there PSTN switches are kept. Since VoIP
switches are not loaded with all numbering plans, all routes but few immediate neighbourhoods,
so they are infinitely dumber than PSTN switch and require lesser army of
operational engineers to take care of that. No sane company will keep a very
intelligent operational engineer to take care of a very dumb device that anyway
works. I hope the engineer would also get bored of it sooner than he is
re-located! VoIP is like a deluge which owes its origin to
the sighs and curses of customers
fleeced in monopoly market and that dark cloud went up the air and now coming
with a force which is washing away PSTN‘s great
columns and poor engineer, good and nice, honest and attached to his machine is
also threatened. Our Operational Engineer, happily engaged in improving ASR
ratio, Test Call, Routing updates and other arcania
was naturally vulnerable to the wicked world outside. Maintenance Engineers is a
misnomer. Operational Engineers in a telecom company performs almost all
maintenance activities inside the office except that are outside the office -
cables, wires, holes, poles and antennas.
Maintenance Engineers come into picture during exceptions and to be
precise, there is not much clear-cut difference between an operational and
maintenance engineer. I will try to narrate a story
only to humanize the situation that Telecom sector has been reflecting under
dual pressure of fundamental technology shifts and something more pervasive -
liberalization. The Life
and Times of Mr. TRX Mr. TRX was Head of a Metro switching
network of a Telco somewhere in Mr.TRX‘s career for last twenty years was a
hard working one. For twenty years or so, he read manuals, designed systems and
their operation, co-coordinated with his colleagues elsewhere, signed
shift-duty lists and managed 24/7 shift and depending on national and
international wing of the monopoly his Company had, at least, once in a two year foreign tour for
three basic purposes – to get trained on equipment, to check a equipment
(capital asset) at factory premise or to accompany premiers and presidents in
distant countries. In between he did a bit of administrative work and exercised
the financial powers vested on him to organize community functions and other events
and non-capital purchases. The career growth was hierarchical, linear as well
as Elevator Mode (you wait in the elevator and you would reach your floor
whether you work, don’t work or even sleep!) Telecom
Monopoly, as we understand now has been the most insular monopoly and in his
last twenty years Mr. TRX
was economic but cost-unconscious, good-intentioned but unconscious about customer, conscious
about accounts but having no idea about finance, extremely adept in systems and
configurations but completely unaware about markets. These were no personal attributes
peculiar to Mr. TRX. It
was the lasting inertia of habit any air-tight monopoly imprints on the culture
which it creates. So Mr. TRX,
now pushed at the top, hierarchically sanctioned and approached the fateful period
of 1998-2000 when Telecom Liberalization
came home to Mr. TRX saw liberalization at its first
impact as a threat, pure and ugly. Later market (his first interaction) taught
him the hidden strength of incumbency and he was little secured. But that hope
was short-lived. The monopoly for which Mr. X used to wok had been privatized. The
initial anxiety was terrific. He was again comforted by the thought that
since he has been part of the monopoly, he can also demand monopoly prices in
the labour market. He was right and he
was wrong. He was right when the asset was engineering or administrative skills
alone and he was wrong when he assumed that market would continue to require those skills in long
term also at the same price.
But He also discounted the fact that, his horoscope is being charted as a man
who, in professional terms is living in an Age of Revolutions. Internet,
being de-centralized is a deep anti-thesis of Central and Hierarchical
structure. The first seed of Internet as an idea was the first voice against
the fundamental tenet of telecom monopoly – the underlying philosophy against one of the grandest man-made
structure of PSTN network that worked for hundred years. It was only a
coincidence that telecom monopolies were the first to be the medium of Internet
and they became, in due course ISPs. Now we know better that ISP and Telco can
be mutually exclusive. Telco‘s entry into ISP business as a historical default
brought changes in Mr. TRX‘s
world beyond comprehension. Very simply put, IP-world is not centrally
maintenance intensive world simply because it is a dumb world individually. To
give an example, it took some 5000 or so Gateway Switches to make the magic of
PSTN globally whereas it takes some millions of hosts to make Internet and much
more Routers than switches. Mr. X had started complaining looking at the young
men now of a different type altogether and to his horror he found out that, even
in technical area which he knew best is out-dated and the new IP world with its
peering, BGP, Protocol, Routers and STM level direct end to end fibre is a
hieroglyphic world for him in maintenance and operational terms. The culture affected him deeply. But
the worst was yet to come. VoIP – the application
in the network that made clear that PSTN era has ended. Telephone Call, The
Telephone Exchange, The Switch, the Cable TV, the Content all became fuzzy and
Cost of Service became the line of life and death. Mr. TRX who had enjoyed the
luxury of not bothered by Cost so far had another factor to tackle with – the
concept of Customer and Churn. Monopoly and intense techno-centricity has kept
him virtually aloof from the miseries and intense world of customer complaints
as well as dealing it and Cost, Customer and Churn all pricked the otherwise
placid life of Mr. TRX as a trident that has a perpetual effect to make life
uneasy. Competition gave birth to another entity called Regulator which as per
habit was a perpetual irritation and nothing else. Cost required a deep understanding
of market forces and the intuitive experience of dealing with market. He was
also destined to experience the effect of outsourcing and a continuous
re-alignment of organizational structure. In the monopoly regime, the structure
was pyramidal and if Hoefstede is right about
hierarchical distance, he was sitting at the apex of the pyramid and command
and control structure was simple and elegant in a way – Thou shall not communicate beyond the next level up and below than
yours. So it was not a team in action, it was a number of loops in the pyramid
among layers and either Strong Policy or Exceptional Situation pushed the loops
as a vector and connected the apex to the base. Under all normal conditions, there
was not much of an effective communication. And in passing, a monopolistic
culture is always in normal condition except when its privilege of monopoly is threatened.
Customer was something for which the organization stands for (not for technical
wizardry of a vaunted engineering corps ) and Churn – a phenomena which has a
triple play embedded in it – Competition has overtaken you, you are failing to convince
customer in the wholesome manner, you are missing something or any combination
of these. Mr. TRX‘s world was remarkably simple and standardized. His machines
and systems were more predictable and responses known. But this Customer and
Market stuff were absolutely a novelty to him and thus he bade farewell to the
organization. As he left the scene, little sad but bewildered and under his
breath he had a profound feeling which his next generation had to face in more
a direct and hard manner – How to cope
with so great a change in so quick a time?
Mr. TRX gave a signal service to the
world of TX and RX. He has passed into history but gave us – the telecom
engineers a forewarning in the form of a personal example if we care to pay
attention to it. I happened to meet him, one day near an imaginary park where he
came for an evening walk. We were talking and his mobile rang. It was the
latest one and he told me, as he took the call – They are quite disturbing but you cannot do without it. There was a
boyish shyness in him. It was this sentence of him and his boyish smile that
taught me more about change than all rhetoric I suffered. Change is after all,
in all the way – disturbing but it is also a situation we cannot do away with. In the next book of
self-instruction, I would try to instruct myself as how to answer Mr. TRX‘s
challenge to posterity – How to cope with
sweeping change in the profession we are in? For the Road-Map for Roads to be Traveled, please read the next
– The Engineering Culture
or Culture
Folio III: History Surrounds us
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