Telecom underestimating need for IP training

The telecom industry is seriously underestimating the training needed to run IP networks and may find itself in dire straits going forward, a telecom industry veteran is warning. Walt Mansell, chief executive officer of Watershed Networks, which sells online training to the telecom industry, points to the growing complexity of software controlled, next-generation IP networks and warns that telecom service providers either need to hire new IP-savvy engineers or do a more thorough job of retraining their existing personnel.

"There is a real misunderstanding of how complex IP networks are," Mansell said in an interview. "It is a much different environment. You need a different skill set.  The industry is underestimating what they have to do to support these networks going forward."

Some industry leaders have spoken out about the need for more IP – and IT – expertise in the past, including Telus Chief Technology Officer Ibrahim Gedeon. But many telecom service providers are choosing not to talk openly about such deficiencies – both AT&T and Qwest Communications declined requests for interviews for Telephony's current series of stories on the changing telecom job market.

Mansell believes too many telecom operators either have their head in the sand on this issue or are struggling to address it. A telecom veteran, Mansell began his career at New England Telephone, then part of Nynex, before going to Bellcore to develop training courses and materials there. He then did a stint at MIT beginning in 1994 on delivering course materials over the Internet and now runs Watershed, which delivers a wide range of training courses.

"When I talk to tier-two and tier-three companies, they don't understand the IP network very well," Mansell said. "They think they can send someone to a two-week training course, and then he can handle everything. IP is a very complicated network – I have been working on it for 18 years now, and the only thing I know for sure is I have a lot to learn."

Mansell offers this very blunt advice to telecom technicians: "If you are a communications tech and you don't understand the difference between TCP and UDP, if you don't know the difference between class of service and quality of service, and if you don't know the difference between a Web server and a streaming server, then not only is your company in trouble, but so is your own career."

Telecom technicians traditionally worked with large monolithic systems such as Class 5 central office switches that had established diagnostic routines, Mansell said. "You run them, and they identify which circuit pack is bad, and you replace that," he said. Now there are many more commodity items – routers, switches, bridges and hubs – whose function is determined by the software loaded into them.