Telecommunications Infrastructure Design
Starting in 1993, while he was in Hong Kong, Ward started taking formal Telecommunications/ Structured cabling courses, through a correspondence program at Washington State University in Pullman (Spokane). This was before Internet-delivered courses. He got a certificate after the first three courses and then dove into Structured cabling/BICSI-type work on Asian projects.
After Ward relocated to San Francisco in 1998, he attended BICSI courses and then in 1999 sat and passed the RCDD exam in Long Beach California. The proctor for that exam in Long Beach was John Bakowski, a Canadian BICSI heavy-weight and past President of the organization.
In 2004, BICSI announced a new Certification program for Wireless Design. Since this matched Ward’s interests and experience, he pursued the study and passed the Certification exam on the first try in 2005.
Structured cabling .
This is a necessary service offering, but it’s not really a differentiator.
Many Engineering firms do this as part of their electrical offering – they treat it as another electrical device type on their drawings. I’m not saying this is wrong per-se, but they do a disservice to the skills of dedicated Comms designers and RCDD’s, where knowledge of the IT infrastructure is paramount. Because they don’t have dedicated telecommunications personnel, they skate along with a very minimal amount of detail, leaving almost all of the work to the integrators.
When our Comms work is not differentiated, it becomes a commodity, and when we leave all of the details to the Comms integrators, the client is not going to see value in our Comms discipline and they will either give this work to other design firms or just give it to a design-build integrator in the first place.
From Acoustics and Audiovisual to Telecom Design
Acoustics, AV & Telecom have one notable common element, Alexander Graham Bell. This Scottish/Canadian/American inventor and businessman coalesced many other scientists work into a business plan to get everyone to ‘talk to each other’. The Bell System grew into a business so big and influential that it was deemed a Monopoly and broken up in 1984. The common element of Acoustics, AV & Telecom is the decibel, named after Mr. Bell, which describes logarithmic ratios of signal levels. It is extensively used in all three industries, Acoustics, Audiovisual and Telecommunications
Ward started working for Shen Milsom & Wilke Inc., out of New York City in 1989, when there were 21 employees in one office (SM&W now has 260 employees in 15 offices). He spent 3 months in New York at the head office, in order to learn the SM&W ‘method’, going back to Hong Kong in 1990 to open the branch office there. At that time Ward was doing Audiovisual and Acoustics, as SM&W was first and foremost an Acoustics consultant. See below on Acoustics knowledge. For the next 3 years Ward did Acoustics and AV.
In 1993, at our annual company ‘off-site’ meetings, Ward was told by Fred Shen that he needed to learn Telecommunications and Networking, as AV was moving in this direction, and that it was a profitable discipline in itself. Ward continued to do Acoustics and AV work right up through leaving SM&W in 2003, although Telecom occupied about half of his billable time.