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I’ll just go ahead and introduce myself then. I am a telecom professional on both day job and home hobby sides of my life. I am an old hag, born in 1979, and I have some strong disagreement with the direction in which both computing and telecom technologies have evolved in the past few decades. I am a retrotechnologist at heart, both retrocomputing and retro-telecom. (See my choice of home instance in the fediverse.)

Since this community is about telecom rather than computing, I’ll skip my retrocomputing escapades in this introduction and go straight to retro-telecom stuff. I live in USA - I wasn’t born here, but I’ve been living in this country since age 15.5, hence almost all of my telecom experience is Amero-centric. I did visit a phone company exchange in my little home town in Russia shortly before moving to USA, but at that age I really didn’t understand much of anything that the host lady was showing me. (She was a telecom engineer at the exchange.)

I absolutely love TDM technology as in T1/E1 and everything adjacent. T1 is North American version which I learned first, E1 is European counterpart which I learned later. I originally learned T1, FT1 (fractional T1) and DDS (digital data service, 64 kbit/s or less) in the context of leased line Internet connections, and I also did a lot of work with North American SDSL technology (2B1Q, not the same as G.shdsl) in those days - I went as far as designing and building my own CSU/DSU for SDSL/2B1Q that could connect to SDSL services from North American ISPs and CLECs in the days when such services still existed. But then in my older years I developed a greater appreciation for T1/E1 technologies in their original native application, which is transport of digitized voice calls on TDM-based PSTN. Also in my older years I joined Osmocom and its closely associated retronetworking community, and developed a new-found appreciation for ISDN.

My current passion in telecom is retro-cellular technologies, particularly GSM, also known as 2G. I detest modern smartphones and refuse to own or use one, instead I like traditional cellular phone handsets from late 1990s into early 2000s. Those phones require a cellular network that puts out GSM signals, but in the present day all major carriers have either already shut down their 2G networks or are in the process of doing so. My solution: start my own cellular phone company specifically focused on GSM/2G! See this post of mine…