30 Years

“So, tell me about your foray into Badminton”

Answering that question started my journey in the wireless industry 30 years ago this month.

Fresh out of college, I stumbled into a great startup doing some fascinating work in RF fingerprinting-based fraud detection in the Analog networks (that’s 1G for the new kids). It will prove to be a great training ground for me. I joined an eclectic group of systems and R&D engineers. We were a small, but mighty and diverse team. Our genius boss, who asked me about the uncommon sport in the US at the time while I kept on anticipating a curveball signal processing question is the most brilliant mathematician and absolutely the best boss I have ever had – Dmitry Kaplan . He has been a great friend and mentor ever since.

In that role, I fell in love with the complexity of the wireless networks and the communications ecosystem.

Our team did groundbreaking work in decision engine and neural networks (yes, AI was there in 1G networks), edge computing (we had to shut down a fraudulent call before it could ring on the other end), distributed intelligence (stuff was running on cellsites and central servers and algorithms will fire depending on what the fingerprinting brain finds), cloud computing (we adopted Mosaic as an UI directly interfacing with perl and awk (remember those?) scripts running on the cellsites and the centralized server in real-time before most even knew how to install it), and much more. That on top of some cutting-edge hardware and signal processing work done to make it all work end-to-end. It required deep systems understanding of the cellular networks and handsets.

I found willing, patient, and kind mentors everywhere and my learning was on an exponential track. They were absolutely some of the best engineers around – Evan Green , Gerrit Barrere Scott Otterson , Tracy Zhang, Fabien Gioanni , Randy McKernan , Bob Jarvis, Forrest Thompson , Stephen F. Elston, PhD , Dave Stanhope, Dave Hoogerwerf , Luca Cazzanti PhD and many others. I also appreciated the support and encouragement of the CEOs Bill Zollner and Joyce Jones.

We were on a mission to eliminate cloning fraud and we did.

Though I did a lot of work as a systems R&D engineer in the early days, it was the opportunity to run massive trials at operators around the globe that really expanded my worldview. I absolutely loved digging into why something was not working the way it was designed to, a curiosity instilled in me by Dmitry from the early days. Findings from those thrilling sessions will lead to insights, training models, algorithms, software, patents, and better outcomes.

I remember sitting on home computer late into the night with the latest ISDN modems dialing with resonant pulses into faraway cellsites and debugging the problems while having the tech and field engineers on the line. Passing the trials was key to winning the contracts and I was right in the thick of it.

I was on the hotseat and loved every minute of it (or at least that’s what I would like to remember).

This gave me the appreciation of systems engineering and connecting the dots, something that is imbued deeply into our culture to this day.

First year into my work, I somehow ended up on the cover of our annual investor report.

I thought I peaked too early.

Since those early days, after a couple of more startup stints, I started our strategy and technology consulting firm 23 years ago and kicked off our annual signature executive summit Mobile Future Forward 15 years ago.

In the last 30 years, I have had the privilege of working with industry’s best from the US wireless industry’s birthplace in Seattle to pretty much every corner of the world, getting into the weeds with major companies and disruptors in the ecosystem across all continents, from governments and regulators to startups and investors - from the mountain kingdom of Bhutan to the pristine islands of the Pacific, from Finland to Brazil, from UK to South Africa, from China to Costa Rica, from India to Portugal, etc. Name any major player and our work has somehow touched or influenced them over the years.

Being at the forefront of every major transition with our customers gave us amazing insights and an appreciation of what’s to come.

Our clients have become friends, our friends have become family.

Over the years, we had the chance to put our thoughts on paper in 15 books and hundreds of research papers, industry updates, and articles.

There was a time before the pandemic when we were averaging one book per year.

In 2008 – we did 3.

Thinking through writing is part of our culture at Chetan Sharma Consulting.

There are so many friends and colleagues to thank that I won’t do justice but some of our early clients and friends played an important role in giving me the confidence to start an independent consulting firm when it was extremely rare to do so. Sunil Jain , Prakash Iyer , Yasuhisa Nakamura, Mike Vanderwoude – thanks for getting me started on this journey.

We have worked with hundreds of companies over the years and thankful for each assignment as it helped us grow. You know who you are.

We are very proud of our contributions in shaping the industry. Our small team punches much above our weight category. Our strategy consulting work has influenced major players around the world and our research insights have appeared in all major media publications.

Mobile Future Forward wouldn’t have become industry’s guiding light had it not been for the support of Biju Nair , Sophia Skaggs , Clifford S Pumphrey III , Hank Skorny , Jeff Giard , Erik Ekudden , Ralph de la Vega , Doug Suriano , Steve Mollenkopf , Neville Ray , Glenn Lurie , Steve Elfman , Anne Baker , Ken Denman , Tyler Davidson , Sandeep Chandel , Paul Palmieri , Caroline Chan , Asha Keddy, NACD.DC , Matthew Roberts , Devin Yaung , Robert Mesirow and countless others in the early days. Our partners have played an equally important role in shaping the agenda over the last decade and a half. Thank you, 爱立信 , 高通 , Amdocs , 英特尔 , 甲骨文 , Assurant , Synchronoss Technologies , Neustar, Inc. , 普华永道 , Tata Group , Mavenir , and scores of others who have supported us from the start.

I have had the great opportunity of being in the front seat of what’s coming and believe me, it doesn’t get old. In our first MFF Book in 2008, in exploring the trends for the coming generation, I wrote, “the next 10 years will be profoundly more disruptive that the previous 100 years.”

This has been true every single year and will be for the foreseeable future.

Well, I still have the same excitement about the industry and the possibilities I had on day 1 three decades ago and can’t wait to explore what’s to come in the coming years.

To all those who have helped us in our journey, those who have trusted us with your strategic initiatives and efforts, those of you who have participated in MFF and MBS over the years, those of you who have become lifelong friends and colleagues, thank you from the center of my cardiovascular system.

Dmitry and I got together this weekend to reminisce about the old days and much more.

See you around.

ps: In case you made it until here and are still wondering about the opening of this piece, I did play competitive badminton in my youthful days being captain of the Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee Badminton team and having won championships in India and US, hence Dmitry's question.