TORONTO – These are busy days for Boris Culum, the winner of the SCTE’s first Young Canadian Engineering Professional of the Year award.
The manager of voice network planning at Rogers Cable has been an important part of the massive growth of the company’s Home Phone product, which has gone from essentially zero to nearly 900,000 wireline customers in just over four years.
While the service is still growing (adding 21,000 customers in the last reported quarter, ended June 30th, for Rogers), that growth has slowed this year as its penetration among basic cable customers approaches 50%.
Culum and the eight senior network engineers he oversees, however, are as busy as they’ve ever been, responsible for any sort of routing changes on the network, for example. Not a simple task.
And as overall subscriber growth on Home Phone slows and the focus of the network is less on adding customers and more on network efficiency and improving the customer experience, “there are a lot of routing changes that can be triggered by the cost-savings or by particular issues in the network,” noted Culum in a recent interview, whether customers are calling across the street, the country, or a cell phone in Mumbai.
And besides routing alterations, “any sort of software or hardware upgrade that happens on any of the platforms in the voice network is also the responsibility of my team,” he added.
And that doesn’t even touch on the future network planning that has to get done, too.
“Oh, it’s extremely busy,” he added.
All this work, this effort to build Rogers Home Phone – and to keep it running and therefore, customers happy – saw Culum rewarded in February with the first ever Young Canadian Engineering Professional of the Year Award, given by the Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers at the February SCTE Canadian Summit in Toronto (sponsored by Aurora Networks and media sponsor Cartt.ca).
The award “means a great deal for a young guy, a young professional,” said Culum. “At first, I was pleasantly surprised that my director went through the effort of filling out the application for it… that at least I was nominated and he held me in high regard.
“I’m proud of the work I’ve done and when I was selected, it meant a great deal.”
With the 2010 Canadian Summit planning now well under way (it’s happening in March 9-10 in Toronto), the SCTE will soon be calling for nominations for the YCEP Award and the organizing committee is asking for members to begin thinking of an excellent young (age 35 and under) candidate for the award.
Watch Cartt.ca and scte.org for more in the coming weeks.
