Projects
Featured Posts
About
Mihai CosmaIT System Engineer
Born in Bistrița
Living in Bucharest
Hello Telecom World!
The Telecom World. It is a world seen only by the people who are already in it. Sort of like “Isla de Muerta” in that sense.
I entered “the Telecom World” when I was 23 and still in “college”. A seasoned (tech wise) colleague helped me get acquainted with some of the words and notions used in the telecom business. He welcomed me into this world on my first day and told me “it was tough to get into but much more tough to get out of”.. or something to that effect and gave me some 1GB worth of pdfs to read. I didn’t understand what he meant at that time, but then again I didn’t understand most of the pdfs either so I just accepted it as such.
And so I learned about the beauty of DSLAMs, VP/VCs, SS7, later DWDM, OLTs and ONUs and forgot all about graph algorithms and everything else I studied. Some of my sarcasm may not be adequately signaled, by the way. At the moment I am trying to do the exact opposite, so this can’t be a general story for everyone, but this is how it was for me. There is, however, a lot of technology in “our” world that “normal people” do not have to bother understanding and once you really get how it works you see some great achievements behind what is normally taken as granted. If anyone is offended by my use of “normal people” for “people not in the telecom business”, well then, he/she should probably not be sent to any of the technical meetings I usually take part of, where any outside consultant has to take an impromptu test before being answered any question.
It is a beautiful world.. a world that unites every country, every person and every revenue unit and gives them numerical IDs. It seems to me that “this world” started with the first telephone call and will never end – as long as people will use voice to communicate. And it actually gives me pride to be in a field that needs to function 24/7/365.25, invented 99.999 SLAs and has to design solutions that take into account earthquakes and nuclear attacks.
It is also a world that touches every industry, either by helping it communicate privately – banks, government, private businesses – or publicly – by providing it with high speed internet connections, call centers and hosting facilities. And then there are the industries that the telecom world supports by being a client – almost half of TV advertising is telecom related – and from what I understand, it is one of the best type of clients.
It is also both brutal and civilized. Competition may end up bankrupting all the industry in one country while spawning giants in others, but the consumer is always usually the one to gain. It promotes new technologies, it invests in people and it changes continuously in order to survive. Sometimes it is profitable, sometimes it is greedy and sometimes it seems old and obsolete, but somehow it is always there when you need it. And it is always needed by someone.
And just as the telecom world invests in its people, the telecom people end up investing their passion, knowledge and time into the telecom world. So it really is hard to leave this world after you know everything about it. It is hard to go back into the world where everything you have to do in order to be able to call across the globe is pay your phone bill on time. So, one day, I will probably also say to a new colleague: “Welcome to the Telecom World. It might have been tough to get into, but it will be a lot tougher to get out of.”
2 Response to “Hello Telecom World! ”
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URL
May 6, 2011
7:22 pm
I’m 23 years, I’m about to enter the Telecom world
May 7, 2011
7:15 am
Mihai