TORONTO – The cable telecommunications industry in Canada has a long and illustrious engineering history.
(This is an excerpt of a speech written and delivered by Cartt.ca editor and publisher Greg O’Brien and Aurora Networks CTO Oleh Sniezko in presenting the first ever Young Canadian Engineering Professional of the Year Award at the SCTE Canadian Summit held Tuesday and Wednesday at the Toronto Congress Centre. Aurora was the sponsor of the award and Cartt.ca the media partner.)
Over its 57 years, Canadian engineers, technologists and technicians built and directed many industry firsts, whether it was microwave relay, fibre optic deployments or as the first adopters of high speed Internet service in North America, among other pioneering efforts.
Names like Jarmain, Metcalfe, Switzer, Girard, Easton, Hamilton-Piercy – these are the engineering pioneers of the early days of the cable industry in Canada.
But as typical Canadians, perhaps we don’t shout our technical prowess from the rooftops as much as we should and some of you may not be familiar with the names of those men.
That was at least part of the reason behind the creation of the SCTE’s new Young Canadian Engineering Professional of the Year Award – to recognize the up-and-coming talent who are leading an industry that’s more than a half-century old into the future.
The organizing committee was heartened to see the quality of the entrants in the inaugural year of this award and are hopeful that it will gain popularity and that the decision of the judges gets even more difficult next year.
This year’s winner – and the award is sponsored by Aurora Networks – whose CTO, by the way, Oleh Sniezko, spent a number of his formative engineering years here in Canada at Rogers – is Boris Culum, manager, voice network planning, Rogers Cable Communications.
In 2005, Boris was hired as the manager of the planning team for Rogers home phone, which quickly became Canada’s largest cable VoIP provider. Boris assembled a team of eight engineers who were accountable for:
* Ensuring deployment of sufficient capacity to meet market demand of over 700,000 units in 18 months.
* The launch of Rogers home phone into new areas (exchanges) beyond initial product launch
* The remedy of service-impacting issues
* The development of tools and processes for managing capacity and new area launches all over a Nortel CS2K switching platform with Nuera TDM gateways.
After the acquisition of circuit-switched competitor Call-Net, or Sprint Canada, as it was known in the market, Boris accepted the position of manager, design and configuration management within voice network planning for all of Rogers cable’s voice networks which, in addition to the Nortel CS2K network, also includes Nortel DMS 250 switches for toll-free and long distance, Lucent 5ESS switches and digital loop carriers and various other application-specific switching and voice mail platforms used by the former call-net for various business customer offerings.
The challenges Boris and his team faced were numerous, to be sure.
They included:
* The deployment of a new international gateway switch to replace aging infrastructure in New York and London, England.
* The first upgrades to deployed EMTAs (over 600,000) in the Rogers home phone network, as well as the process development to achieve this.
* Implementation of a loss plan to minimize echo experienced by customers.
* Analysis and development of a growth model for CS2K switches used for Rogers home phone, that promotes the preferential use of geographic splits as opposed to serving area overlays.
* Implementation of a new process between network operations and network planning to formalize engagements within problem management.
* Integration activities for voice networks acquired through acquisitions, such as FCI, ACI, and Group Telecom.
Since joining Rogers, Boris has consistently been rated with the highest performance rating awarded. he is particularly strong in accountability, teamwork, customer focus, and innovation competencies and Rogers home phone is one of the company’s strongest growth stories.
He is a deserving candidate for this new award.
