Adventures of an International Telecom Engineer Part I

I found the world of telecom a wild ride for the more half a dozen years from 1994 through 2001.  When I first entered that world in 1980 as an employee of Western Electric, it was a rather sedate world dominated by Western’s parent company, American Telephone and Telegraph, better known as AT&T. 

In that year the technology behemoth dominated the US telecom market boasting more than one million employees.  They were near the very top of the Fortune 500.  The Bell System, as AT&T and its subsidiaries called themselves, not only provided local and long distance phone service, they also built the phones, transmission systems, and switches that made phone service possible.  They even manufactured the wire and fiber optic cables that interconnected the network.  The factory where I was employed, the Merrimack Valley Works, employed 12,000 people who produced transmission equipment and the components that went into that equipment: printed wiring boards, ferrites, resistors, capacitors, coils, mini-oscillators, and more. 

This engine of innovation was driven by Bell Telephone Laboratories – Bell Labs – unquestionably one of the premier research and development entities in the world.

Divestiture mandated by the US courts in 1984 ended this domination and began the slow decline of AT&T, especially its manufacturing arm, over the next two decades.  The Regional Bell Operating Companies that provided local phone service became independent companies.  Merrimack Valley slowly shrank as many components were outsourced to smaller companies, and eventually, overseas.

Western Electric would spin off in 1996 as Lucent Technologies and would eventually lose its identity as an American icon when it merged with French rival Alcatel in 2007. 

But in 1994, this unthinkably negative fate was the furthest from our minds in the euphoria that was the telecom bubble.  In the 1990’s, the sky was the limit.  The Internet and the World Wide Web would drive the demand for more and more bandwidth, and billions would be made as customers worldwide paid more and more for an expanding array of telecom services, or so the conventional wisdom of the time told us.

It was during this heady time that I moved from the comparatively sheltered life of a factory shop supervisor to the much bigger world of international technical support.  Actually, it was a return to technical support.  I had been promoted into a Software Systems Test group in 1987 to support  a domestic transmission product, DACS II.  The move into the factory as a manager was a temporary detour. 

At the end of 1993, I returned to engineering to join a group supporting a brand new product for the international market, DACS VI.  It was the best decision of my career.