Ian Eldridge

Background

About Ian Eldridge

I started in Telecoms with BTI in October 1981 as one of the last tranche of apprentices for quite some time. During my time with BTI, we got a grounding in various aspects of the business at places such as Caroone House, Cardinal House, Caxton,House St Botolphs House, Paul St, Featherstone St, Electra House, and Keybridge House where I finished in the international exchange there after the 3 year programme. I left the city and moved to a great job in East Grinstead as an OMI in my Busby van and spent several years learning and achieving up poles and in houses of every description. My talents were then turned back to the office where I became a Distribution Officer in charge of allocatiing the work and dealing with the customers directly on my deskphone. With the onset of CSS, I entered into a new "paperless" era before moving to Brighton and running the team on DO's and FDO's as TOA including the introduction of Work Manager as the system of choice and all of the troubles that posed. Missing out on a promotion locally, I moved to Delta Point in Croydon as part of the datafill team in Featurenet where although virtually every terminology used was like a new language to me I had a natural aptitude to programming and I progressed until I was part of the elite (niche) team that was in charge of implementing new products into the Featurenet program. After a few years with this team working every weekend I could, I was enticed away from the warm bosom of BT to the outside world after 18 years of service. This was a shock to the system with challenges and surprises in equal amounts. I worked as a switch engineer for GTS on the Nortel DMS and GSP switches in UK and supporting personnel around Europe and had some experience on Ericsson AXE and Siemens EWSD before the company was broken up and sold off. Next stop was a particular project for Dimension Data working out of Sunbury-on-Thames whereby as a team we installed, built, monitored and managed a mobile gateway network.