Telecom engineers are no longer needed only to ensure that customers can make or receive calls. In India, after the 1994 deregulation in communication networks, the telecom sector has transformed itself into a vast ocean of possibilities.

Vadeesh Budramane, Managing Director, FCG, tells that one of the possibilities is the pizza coupon application. A telecom engineer now, to take an example, has to understand the technicalities of, say, a customer receiving pizza coupons on his hand-held mobile device through SMS when he is in the vicinity of a pizza joint. Such killer applications are getting more creative and the world is now on your communicating device, courtesy the telecom engineer. Sailing here is all work and all play too for telecom engineers. There is wireless, wireline, optical, datacom, and intelligent networks to contend with. Add to that the next generation networks consisting of soft switches, signaling protocol, and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), Global System for Mobile communications (GSM), network or element management, and broadband network.

The boom in telecom was on expected lines with over 275,000 telecom jobs moving to India, China, and other low-wage nations by the year 2008 according to a Deloitte Touche survey of 42 global telecommunications operators. The report shows that global telecom giants will move about 5 percent of the industry’s 5.5 million member workforce—or 275,000 positions—to low-cost countries.

Who is a telecom professional?
According to Budramane a telecom engineer say in switching is the one who has proficiency in switches, signaling protocols, and network management. A telecom professional is involved in implementing the design from the software he creates and testing the software for the intended functionality—that is, how it functions in an integrated environment at the client’s side. As per the functionality, an end-to-end responsibility is to be taken up with maintenance of features in accordance with the new requirements that may spring from the client or market tectonics. Many such movements have given telecom engineers an array of choices to look forward to.

The broad fork in the telecom space