Engineer Manager

Mark Ian Pate

* *** *******, ***** ********, Cheltenham ****@******.**.**

Communications

SKILLS

New technologies experience in UMA, Femtocell and IMS

•

Excellent knowledge of the GPRS Core Network (SGSN, GGSN) and a good

•

understanding of UMTS – 6 Years

In-depth knowledge of E1 links and appreciation of T1 – 10+ years

•

Good working knowledge of SS7, R1, R2, R2D, C5 - 10+ years

•

Cisco router and switch configuration – 6 years

•

TCP/IP – 10+ Years

•

Working knowledge of multiple access techniques, including TDMA (time division

•

multiple access), FDMA (frequency division multiple access) and an appreciation

of CDMA (Carrier Division Multiple Access) – 10+ years

Excellent working knowledge of modulation, including PCM (pulse code

•

modulation), ADPCM (adaptive differential PCM) – 10+ years

Good knowledge of Satellite communications technologies – 6 years.

•

IT Skills

Sun Solaris/SunOS (Unix) System Administration and fault diagnosis – 10+

•

years

A good working knowledge of Microsoft NT4/2000/XP - 8 years

•

C and Pascal programming – 6 Years

•

Shell scripting (bash, csh, sh) – 6 Years

•

Perl scripting – 3 Years

•

Linux System Administration – 6 years

•

SQL – 3 Years

•

LynxOS – High availability OS – 2 Years

•

EXPERIENCE MiCOMS Ltd 2008 – 2008

Cheltenham, UK

Director and consultant

MiCOMS Ltd is the company which I established to offer consultancy services to

mobile operators and infrastructure providers.

To date my client is Motorola Ltd based in Swindon where I am team leader to

provide 24x7 commercial support for the Motorola Femtocell and UMA solutions. This

includes support of the GPRS and 2G core and specific support to Motorola’s partners

to ensure that development and testing can be performed. Experience of a wide

range of protocols and technical standards is required to be able to debug the

solution at interface level to clearly identify issues within the products.

In addition, I also manage Fix, Feature and Release management for IMS commercial

loads.

Alcatel-Lucent 2007 – 2007

Den Haag, Netherlands

Senior IMS Engineer

Alcatel-Lucent has an extensive contract as systems integrator with the incumbent

landline and mobile operator within the Netherlands. I was a member of an

internationally derived team to provide operational support and consultation services

for the IMS and was based within the customer’s premises.

The role demanded post integration support and monitoring of the complete IMS

system to allow for resolution of fault situations within the agreed SLA. This also

involved escalations to 3PV's of the multi-vendor solution and managing issues

through to completion.

Significant Telecommunications experience meant that I was able to support from the

subscriber’s ATA through to PSTN breakout with SS7, Carrier Select, Carrier Pre-

Select and supplementary services.

In addition to regular support, I had implemented a number of scripts which allow for

specific monitoring of certain parts/functions of the system to allow more rapid

support during a period where OSS visibility was limited.

Motorola Ltd, 1998-2007

Swindon, UK

Technical Engineering Manager

This role as Technical Manager involved the development of a capable EMEA based

technical support team of ten technically diverse engineers to provide customer

focused and specialized support of SGSN, GGSN, PoC, IMS and UMA both in trial and

post sales. This required significant technical input to help Motorola grow into new

opportunities as they moved towards the Seamless Mobility arena whilst achieving

the regional support objectives by maintaining existing SLA commitments.

During this period I also was part of and maintained the department on-call rota

where I specifically provided 24x7 on-call support for management escalations, 24x7

on-call support for triage of IMS issues and 24x7 technical on-call support for the

Motorola GPRS solution.

Senior Staff Engineer

The position of Senior Staff Engineer highlights a significant promotion within

Motorola where an engineer moves onto Motorola’s Technical Ladder. The Technical

Ladder has been developed to recognise those who wish to remain purely technical

and provides a career path up to CTO (Chief Technical Officer). Promotions to the

Technical Ladder are approved by stringent analysis of the technical contributions of

the individual.

This role involved second-line support of the Motorola GPRS Core Network solution

and required:

Diagnosing issues with the entire GPRS infrastructure;

•

Decoding software and Protocol Analyser data capture log files for the SGSN,

•

GGSN, CGW, PCU and MS;

In-depth analysis of the ETSI GPRS standards to ensure conformity of our and

•

our competitors’ products;

Support of hardware and software from many different vendors;

•

Understanding the GPRS interfaces: Gb (Frame-relay, NS, BSSGP, SNDCP),

•

Gn (IP, GTP), Gr (SS7);

Participation in a 24*7 on-call rota.

•

During this period, I designed and developed a tool that prioritised the work of

Motorola’s entire support and development engineering teams who were involved in

supporting the Motorola BSS, PCU, GSN, OMC and Software Application products. The

tool prioritised issues in line with customer contracts and severity of the issue to

maximise customer satisfaction and minimise penalty payments. This was used by in

excess of 200 engineers and prioritised over 2000 issues.

Other significant development activities included:

Developments of a dissector for a Motorola proprietary TCP/IP interface using

•

the open source Ethereal TCP/IP stack decoder. This allowed Motorola

engineers to quickly decode and debug the messages on this interface.

The development of a number of command line and web based tools to aid

•

the analysis of the GPRS protocols and debugging equipment log files.

The provision of WAP functionality using the open-source Kannel WAP

•

gateway, and authentication using the open-source Freeradius software.

GPRS Core Lead Engineer

This role was second-line support of the Motorola Core Network Solution as described

above.

I had also taken the initiative to deploy RedHat Linux on a Compaq server to provide

full server capabilities to support the GPRS solution at no further cost to Motorola.

These services included HTTP, FTP, DNS, NTP, and NFS.

OMC-R Support Engineer

I was a member of a team that provided technical support and outage recovery to

Motorola's global GSM customer base for the OMC-R and Motorola packet-switch

products. The OMC-R is based on a Sun E3500 Solaris server providing operations

and maintenance functions, allowing configuration and statistical analysis of the

customer’s network via a graphical user interface.

Within this role, I quickly became recognized, by support staff and the development

organization, as the focal point for support of the X.25 packet-switch utilized by the

OMC-R to communicate with the Motorola BSS.

Government Communications HQ 1990-1998

Cheltenham, UK

Technical Support Engineer

This was a very diverse and demanding post, which required first and second line

support of a large range of systems and equipment within defined Service Level

Agreement's.The systems supported included:

Satellite antennas and tracking systems,

•

signal feeds (mainly L, C and Ku band and being wave-guide or coaxial),

•

frequency down converters to a 70MHz or 21.4MHz IF (intermediate

•

frequency),

de multiplexing and demodulation equipment to provide raw signals.

•

Civilian communications systems became a significant part of this role where I started

to work with Channel Associated Signalling Systems (R1, R2, C5), Common Channel

Signalling System (C7/SS7) and the hybrid system R2D. These signals were collected

from E1 links over satellite and DCME trunks and decoded by specialized equipments.

During the final few months of my employment, I was awarded a staff merit award

for work that I initiated to decode the telephone numbers from a unique signaling

system on an E1 link. This allowed specific data collection to be performed, for which

the results were described as “this work contributed to the successful outcome of an

important National goal, of international importance”.

Trainee Engineering Technician

This was a four-year apprenticeship, with the first two years being mainly theoretical

on the wide field of telecommunications and satellite systems. The second two years

being on-the-job training culminating in the position described above.

During the initial two year training period, I was awarded the following:

Mechanical engineering award,

•

Trainee engineering technician of the year

•

The Ray Brown Trophy for Engineering Studies.

•

EDUCATION

Cheltenham & Gloucester College of Higher Education 1992–1994

Cheltenham, UK

Higher National Certificate in Electronics Engineering

•

Gloucestershire College of Arts and Technology 1990-1992

Cheltenham, UK

Ordinary National Certificate in Electronics Engineering

•

Tewkesbury School 1983-1990

Tewkesbury, UK

A Level

Computing, Design & Technology

•

General Certificate of Secondary Education

Computing, English, Mathematics, Physics, Design & Realisation, Technology,

•

Chemistry

Contact this candidate