Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Drive testers dial up jobs in hard-hit telecom industry

From: [email-masked]
Date: Sun, 24 Aug 2003 04:29:47 -0400

Drive testers dial up jobs in hard-hit telecom industry

By Pamela Sitt
Seattle Times business reporter

Steve Keim is officially called a wireless baseline technician, but ask him to
describe what he does for a living and he'll tell you
this: "You know that guy on the Verizon Wireless commercial? That's what I do."

Not that Keim walks around with a cellphone and says, "Can you hear me now? Good."

Turns out the real thing is a bit more sophisticated. The job involves driving —
not walking — thousands of miles a week to test
the company's wireless network, which serves 34 million cellphone customers.

Technicians like Keim travel highways, neighborhood streets and mountain roads.
Other wireless companies, including AT&T
Wireless, Nextel and Sprint, use similar methods to test network performance.

Keim has been working three years as a "test guy," as baseline technicians are
informally known. He says he got lucky in
landing his job. Keim's position is a coveted one, and there aren't many of them
out there.

Verizon Wireless, for example, has about 60 nationwide. Sprint employs several
engineers who continually test its network
from Bellingham to Vancouver, Wash., said spokesman Dave Mellin. Nextel has 13
engineers in Washington who, among
other things, conduct drive tests to test the network, according to Colin Holland,
regional vice president for engineering.

The industry was hit hard by the tech downturn. Out of 1.2 million telecom workers
in 2000,
more than 600,000 were laid off from 2001 to 2003. Now things have leveled off and
might
even be looking up, experts say.

"Telecom, which led the way in 2001 and 2002 as an area of the economy that saw
more
layoffs than any other sector, is not even in the top five this year," said John
Challenger,
CEO of Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a Chicago-based outplacement company. "So
certainly, the layoffs there have subsided."The industry employs workers in a
variety of
occupations, from customer-service representatives to computer-software engineers
to technical support.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics expects employment to increase by more than 10
percent through 2010.

The strong demand for cellphones will contribute to continued growth in the
wireless portion of the industry.

The cellphone testers for Verizon make from $32,000 to $55,000 a year, according
to company spokeswoman Georgia
Taylor. The position requires a two-year technical degree or equivalent special
electronics training, or work experience in
technical or computer science, she said. And, of course, a valid driver's license.

Keim, who formerly worked in customer service and technical support, drives a
white SUV loaded with $300,000 worth of
equipment, including a laptop computer, GPS receivers, scanners, multiple antennas
and eight cellphones from six different
carriers.

A computer system dials phone numbers connected to Keim's office from the
cellphones,
then monitors reception as prerecorded phrases are repeated during each 2½-minute
call.
The system makes about 1,400 test calls a day.

"It catalogs who gets a dropped call, who gets a busy signal, who gets a normal
call," said
Keim, 33, of Renton. "I'm out here trying to represent the average-Joe customer,
using
average-Joe phones and average-Joe service."

Instead of the now-famous catchphrase, "Can you hear me now?" Keim tests carefully

worded phrases with combinations of consonants and vowels common in everyday
speech.
For instance: "He ran halfway to the hardware store." "These days a chicken leg is
a rare
dish."

"I've always liked the technical aspect of the cellphones," Keim said. "(My job)
takes me all
over the Northwest and keeps me pretty busy."

Keim's Washington route is based on state Department of Transportation
information. "We tally the
top 10 percent of traveled roads, according to DOT," he said. "My route includes
75 percent of
those roads."

Keim logged about 86,000 miles last year in his seven-state territory, which also
includes Oregon,
Idaho, Montana, Utah, northern Wyoming and Hawaii.

He estimates he's on the road two to three weeks a month; on a recent trip to
Montana, he drove
4,200 miles in one week.

When he's not in his mobile office, Keim is sitting behind a desk at the Verizon
Wireless offices in
Bellevue, where he processes data and generates maps and reports. The company also
tests and documents the performance
of its competitors, including AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, Nextel and Qwest.

"It's a lot of driving, but it's great to see the results," Keim said.

Pamela Sitt: 206-464-2291 or [email-masked]

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2001601182_tech24.html

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