My Career in a Nut Shell.

Over the last 20 years, I’ve been involved in many amazing projects, and as I’m currently between jobs, I thought it would be a great time to reflect on the progress made and the positive outcomes I’ve had. From the start, I was pretty lucky; my first job was with British Rail, and although that brand isn’t famous or particularly desirable to be associated with, the organization was very supportive. In fact, I ended up being sponsored through college and came out of the process with qualifications, no debt, and a job, which these days seems to be quite rare.

Later, through privatization, the division I worked for was acquired by RACAL (if you remember that name, you will understand the importance). This slingshotted me into wireless communications, and I’ve been in the industry ever since. It's been a major interest my whole life and a source of some amazing experiences, locations, people, and has led me to be involved with some great products, for which I am very grateful.

I’ve worked for a long list of notable companies and hope to have been relatively influential while doing so. RACAL was a great start; from there, I spent some time at Vodafone, Eurotunnel, and a couple of WISPs where I grew up with IP wireless technologies. I was lucky enough to manage and deploy some of the very first PtMP networks in the UK back in 2004. From here, I started to get interested in vendors and landed a role with Wi-Lan, my first cutting-edge technology company of the time. Side note - Wi-Lan patented W-OFDM and later stopped manufacturing wireless products; this patent allowed them to survive healthily to this day.

Over the next few years, I worked for various companies, mostly microwave and mmW backhaul manufacturers. I enjoyed these times; there was a lot of travel, and I worked all over the world. Notable trips were to Australia (Cloud Break Mine) and Canada (Grand Cache mine), where I was involved in deploying and optimizing mesh networks used for monitoring massive loaders and reclaimers.

More recent times - The last 10 years were different; the event of children meant my career had to adapt, and I looked for more office-based roles. This turned out to take me into Product Management. Given my background and contact with real-world problems, I leaned on experience to help me identify markets and approaches to best fit products; this had various levels of success. Some of the most notable products were PPM’s RF over Fiber modules used for Teleport locations globally. I picked up a lot of experience and some great contacts with large organizations - NASA, Telespazio, Orange, and the UK defense sector, to mention just a few. Later, I moved to QinetiQ, where I was privileged to product manage a counter UAV Radar product (Obsidian) and RGNS. For an annoyingly short time, Dragon Fire was on my radar, but unfortunately, I moved on before I got involved. Dragon Fire just completed its first series of live tests (see the QinetiQ website for the latest news).

Last year took me off track slightly. I came across an opportunity to work with a group that was advancing Smart City management (wireless metering), primarily via older wireless technologies of different sorts (not a bad thing). At the time, I wasn’t sure if this was a good place to be; now looking back, I realize that there is a big technology gap in this sector. Although LoRa Wan and WmBus can be used for connecting devices (this was successfully demonstrated), the way forward is probably to use existing cellular infrastructure to get the best building penetration. Anyways…

If you have read this far, I’m impressed!

I’m now looking to do the next thing and my next adventure. If you see value in my experience and can put it to good use, I would very much like to hear from you!

John Golding