These days my Facebook wall is full of people taking the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. It's a great cause and the challenge has helped raised both awareness and funds to find a cure for ALS.

People all over the world are taking the challenge and posting their videos from their phones. Think about it for a second – a phone is recording a video clip, processing it, and sharing the clip instantly to platforms like Facebook. All this is possible from just a phone!

Sure, it's the Internet that makes all this possible. However, it's advances in the telecommunications industry that gives your phone fast Web access. If you are in the western hemisphere, you are probably used to 3G data rates. Your provider likely also offers a faster 4G network.

What does this mean to you? Some obvious examples are watching entire movies on your smartphones and super-fast social media. And think how healthcare will evolve with faster mobile data? A doctor will be able to diagnose patients via videoconference from a cell phone. The doctor won't need to be physically present in the hospital to access a better network.

Because the phones will provide more processing power, all applications that need to access huge data sets will become mobile. At the backbone of it, what really connects the phones to the web, is the telecommunications network. The telecom network is constantly evolving towards providing you not only better voice quality but also better connectivity.

If the thought of making all this happen is exciting to you, then consider a career as a telecommunications network engineer. These engineers are responsible for planning the telecom network to cover a geographical area.

Let's say that the project is to provide 3G coverage to a new area. Some of the questions that a telecom network engineer would need to answer are:

• What kind of a landscape does this area represent? Does it have flat areas or is it an urban area with a high density of tall buildings?
• How many cell towers are required to provide adequate coverage?
• What kinds of wave propagation models are required to simulate the coverage?

I recently interviewed Nikhil Gogate on life as a telecommunications network engineer. Nikhil is a Director of Operations at Solutelia, a telecommunications firm where he is responsible for the planning and development of the next challenges in wireless connectivity.

He started as a drive test engineer analyzing the signal coverage in different geographical landscapes all across the US. The data collected via drive testing helps the network planning team work on any optimizations to provide better coverage and quality. Later on, Nikhil advanced to the role of a network design engineer responsible for the planning and layout of the cell towers.

It may surprise you that a telecom engineer has to work with civil and construction engineers as well. This is to ensure that the landscape provides adequate support for the cell towers and whether a cell tower is environmentally feasible.

One big trend driving telecom engineering is the quest to provide excellent data coverage in indoor areas like sports arenas and convention centers. The deployment requires significant amount of planning not only with other telecom engineers but also civil engineers. There is also a testing phase prior to rollout where drive or indoor test engineers collect data points that help the designer make appropriate changes.

Some of the tips that Nikhil suggested to help a budding telecom engineer are:

• Work on a telecom degree, either a bachelor or masters
• Some of the telecom courses that will help you
• Telecom Network Design
• Antenna Theory and RF propagation
• Distributed Antenna Systems
• Learn programming
• Keep yourself updated on trends and developments in telecommunications

The future of telecom is really bright. No matter where you are located in the world people will need better connectivity, better coverage, and faster data. You can read or listen to Nikhil's interview where he provides more details on the above topics.

 

About the Author

Hemang J. Shah, PhD is on a mission to educate millions of engineers about life in the engineering job world. He shares the journey of accomplished engineers and his tips on differentiating yourself at his blog http://www.engineerthedots.com.