NGN Environment - New Industry Dimension, New Industry Challenges

Michael Lawrey Executive Director, Network Services Telstra Corporation Limited

Telstra is a fully integrated telco which provides a diverse range of services to its customers. In the NGN space I believe the industry has a major challenge to face in respect to application performance and end to end customer experience. Traditionally the suppliers and telco alarm the technology infrastructure and in the past where the product has resided predominantly on the same technology this has been adequate. The NGN environment however brings a new dimension for the industry to work with.

Customer services in an NGN environment are provided from a multitude of access environment through Ethernet aggregation points and into an IP Core, services are then delivered either by the telco or through a third party. Understanding the customer experience in this new environment and the multitude of applications performance end to end is a huge challenge for the industry.

We need to think about the way we obtain the application and customer experience information in a different way. No longer can we rely on the operator having to pull information from the respective technology boxes, we now need the technology, the application and the customers CPE to be sending information to north bound interfaces so that the customer experience can be assessed. This of course would only be done by exception (when something is wrong) otherwise the volume of data would be too great.

So if you have any thoughts on how the industry can break through here I would like to here from you.

Regards
Michael Lawrey

Commenced employment with the Post Master General in 1970 as a Technician in Training and progressed through the technical areas to become a Manager in 1989. During that time Michael worked in areas such as Construction (both metro and country), Operations and Support. Michael’s first management role was in the Internal Plant area for Corporate Customer Division in Perth and he went on to be the Manager for telephone provisioning having a wide range of responsibilities including sales and PABX installation.

In 1992 Michael moved to the role of Network Operations Manager for Country Division in Western Australia and was later seconded to Melbourne in late 1993 to be part of the Operation and Maintenance review of the then Telecom Australia’s network. As part of this review Michael worked in the United States for a short period with Pacific Bell and USWest. For the next two years Michael’s work involved industrial negotiations and development of a new Operations and Maintenance Organisation.

In 1995 Michael was appointed as the as the Regional Manager Network Operations Western Australia and in 1996 became the Regional Network Manager Western Region (WA/SA/NT). In 1998 Michael moved to Commercial &Consumer Service as the Regional General Manager for Western Australia. From here he moved back to Melbourne where he took on the Role of General Manager Global Operations and in August 2001 became the Executive General Manager Network Operations responsible for the operations of all Telstra’s infrastructure platforms both domestically and globally. In August 2002 he was appointed to the position of Head of Network Services in Telstra and set a challenge of bringing together not just the operational aspects of the Telstra network business but also the service management.

Over the last five years his focus has been in evolving the business model of operations in Telstra to meet the needs of the business and our customers in a rapidly developing environment. Michael is currently the Executive Director of Network Services a role he has held for the last five years.

In addition to the day job Michael is also proactively involved in the industry and holds the following positions.

- Director on the board of the Telemanagement Forum
- Co-chair of the Services Network Operations Forum ITU-T United Nations
- Director on the board of the Telecommunications industry Ombudsman

Michael’s personal interests are kayaking, bush walking, swimming and bike riding.