A career spent on every side of the radio site

The first site I planned on my own, on a ridge above L'Aquila in the spring of 2000, was in the wrong place. My prediction tool said it would cover two villages in the valley below. The drive test said it covered one, and the people in the other kept walking to the church square to make a call for another eight months while we found a landlord for a second mast. I had graduated in telecommunications engineering from the Ateneo di Valmerana in July 1999 and joined Nerantel, then one of Italy's mobile operators, as a radio planning engineer in Rome three months later. That ridge left me with a habit I still have: I believe a measurement over a map, and I want to know who will be inconvenienced if the map is wrong.

In 2003 I moved to the other side of the industry, joining the Italian business of Halvorsk Networks, a European equipment maker, as an integration engineer for 3G. Within two years I was managing rollout projects for two operators at once. The supplier's side taught me things I have used ever since as a customer: how a supplier decides which operator's problem to solve first, how a contract drafted by lawyers can leave nobody responsible for the seams between two systems, and how much an operator's own engineers know that never reaches the tender documents.

In July 2008 Halvorsk asked me to run its managed-services contract for a Greek mobile operator, and I moved to Athens. We ran the operator's radio and transmission network with 340 people under a seven-year contract. Eighteen months later Greece entered its financial crisis, and our client cut its budget every year while its customers, and the islands' summer visitors, used more data. I learnt to run a network on less: which maintenance can wait and which cannot, how to tell a client that the cut it wants will appear as outages on Naxos in August, and how to keep good technicians whose pay has been frozen for three years. I also learnt Greek, badly at first.

I crossed to the operator side in September 2012 as director of the radio access network at Aldera Comunicações in Lisbon. My two tasks were the 4G rollout and a radio-sharing agreement with a rival, Marévia Móvel, covering the sparsely populated interior. The negotiation took eight months, and I spent most of them on the clauses about how the agreement would end. My counterpart thought that pessimistic. I thought a fifteen-year arrangement between competitors would outlast both companies' strategies, and it did.

In February 2017 I came home to Italy as chief technical officer of Torrevia Towers, a tower company carved out of an operator two years earlier. A tower company sells space, height and power, and I found that it understood the first two much better than the third. Diesel generators ran thousands of hours a year at off-grid sites, battery sets were specified by habit, and nobody could tell a tenant how long its equipment would stay up in a blackout. I studied part time for a master's degree in energy systems at the Politecnico Albrenta while we replaced generators with solar panels and lithium batteries on 1,450 towers and defined battery classes by what each site served. Most of what I now argue about power began there.

I joined Corvalta Mobile as chief technology officer in January 2021. Corvalta is a challenger: it started as a virtual operator in 2009, began building its own radio network in 2013 and grew faster than its engineering records. Within three months the board asked me for a plan to remove a supplier that had come to be treated as high-risk, and within two years the energy crisis had more than doubled our electricity bill. The decisions described on this site follow from those two events, and from a voice outage in July 2024 that showed our second core site was not the copy we believed it to be.

I work through written decisions. Each significant technical choice at Corvalta has a short paper setting out the options, the cost of each, the people who disagree and what they would do instead, and I keep the papers so that we can check later who was right. I spend one day a fortnight with field teams, because the people who climb masts know which of our plans are fantasies. I am direct with suppliers and, I hope, fair: I tell them early when they are losing and why. Colleagues would say that I ask how something will fail before I ask what it will do, that I am stubborn about tests and that I change my mind when a measurement disagrees with me, which has happened more than once.

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