Clint Sharp’s Blog an’ Vlog

Apparantly I haven’t updated this blog in 3 months. My how things change. So, since my last post, I’ve accepted a new job in Denver and my daughter is three months older (crawling, teething, sitting up on her own, etc).

I’m not exactly sure what causes me to not update the blog, but I suppose it’s just life in general. It’s hard to want to sit down and write a blog post when I’m so busy with work and the home life. Katie keeps me busy when I’m at home (because when I’m at home, usually I’ve been gone for some time and it’s my turn to make up for time lost in childcare). When I’m not at home, I’m on the road and I’m busy working.

Lets give the work update because I’m sure that’s mostly what I’ll be writing about in the near future. Almost two months ago it became apparant it was time for a change. I needed to be making more money, and it became obvious that my goals and plans for doing that in Fort Smith, Arkansas were for not. It’s unfortunate, and I’m sure there were many execution failures on my part that could have resulted in a more positive outcome for me continuing to live in Fort Smith, but the reality of the situation is that, in the end, it didn’t work out for the second time. It’s unfortunate, and I’m very sad about it. However, what’s done is done, and while I can reflect upon it and determine what I’ve done wrong, in the end it’s just not going to work out. So, near the end of August I started contacting old friends in the Wireless world, people I used to work at back when I worked at AT&T Wireless/Cingular. Obviously, the most influential of these people was Dave Truzinski, who is the current CIO of Leap Wireless, which you might know as Cricket Communications. A couple of days later Dave came back to me wondering if I’d be interested in a contracting position, and things have progressed from there.

Firstly, let me tell you a bit about Cricket. Cricket is a unique play in the wireless world. In terms of wireless companies out there, Cricket/Leap is very small. Annual revenues were around $1 billion for 2005. Cingular, for example, when I left was around a $60 billion unit of SBC/BellSouth (soon to be the combined AT&T). So in terms of POPs covered and subscribers, Leap is barely on the radar of most industry analysts (I’ve rarely seen Om Malik writing about them, but I think they probably deserve more coverage than they get. They just spent nearly a billion dollars in the AWS spectrum auction for example). So, as I was saying, Cricket is a unique play in the wireless world. Cricket focuses mainly on lower income subscribers, competing with MVNOs like Virgin Mobile, TracFone, etc. However, Cricket is unique in this market being that it owns its own network. Secondly, Cricket is very unique is that it offers all you can eat plans, of which I believe only Metro PCS also offers aside from Cricket.

So, I accepted a contract position with Cricket working on their new nationwide network rollout. We’ve rolled out a killer new nationwide WAN which should provide a good amount of growth room. We’re current doing and will be doing a lot of very interesting things over this grand new network. My job for this contract was basically to help get the ball rolling in finishing the rollout. I flew to various cities including San Diego, Houston, San Antonio, Nashville, Phoenix, Spokane, Tulsa, and probably some others I’ve forgotten over 4 weeks to help them get the facilities provisioned and ready to complete the rollout.

After the contract was nearing an end, I became involved with the IPTel project. I’m now currently working on rolling out Cisco IP Telephony system. I’ve done this before with AT&T Wireless, when we rolled out this same solution to the Caribbean. I came onto a project with numerous issues and a long way to go to completion, so it should be a lot of fun. There’s nothing I like more than to be a fireman, so a project in trouble is my idea of a good time. There’s lots of work to be done and lots of room to roll out some really cool telephony features, so I’m pretty happy at the moment. I’ve written in the past and continue to feel that there’s a lot of issues with larger companies (and while Cricket may be small for the Wireless world, a $1 billion annual company is still a large company in my book), there are certain aspects that make it to where I can fit in quite well. Unfortunately, smaller companies can’t offer the range of opportunities to work on cool projects and cool equipment that larger companies can. Hopefully Cricket is the right size and I can be happy there. Who knows, that remains to be seen, but I’m very excited about the prospects now.

I leave on Monday for San Diego again to work on another project in trouble for a week, then hopefully back to IPTel. I’m going to try to keep this blog updated on the progress of this project, what I’ve seen and experienced with Cisco IP Telephony implementations (especially my experience with it compared to things I really like about Asterisk), and what’s going in general with my business life. Hopefully if I can get some free time at home, I’ll also update with a video of what’s going on with my kid, because she’s really the light of my life, and she’s really at the perfect video age.

Best of luck to the few readers I have left, and I hope I can find time to keep you all updated in the near future.