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Telenet |
2004-... |
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Beginning 2004, Telenet desides to incorporate the technical part of Sinfilo into the company.
I decide to go to Telenet where I'll be responsible for the complete Sinfilo network, now rebranded into Telenet Hotspot, and the technical development and integration within Telenet and with external parties under which B-Telecom (the Belgian railway IT company), Lunch Garden (restaurants) and Q8 (petrol stations).
In 2005, the year that Telenet went to the stock market, I was responsible for implementing Public Wireless LAN roaming agreements with partners such as iPass, T-Systems, Boingo, Orange FR, Quiconnect and others.
Also in 2005, I finished the integration of Airespace WLAN switches into our Garderos/FreeRadius core hotspot system by using Cisco's CNR DHCP server with TCL extensions calling custom daemons that I wrote in Perl (one to interact with the Cisco Airespace switches and one to interact with FreeRadius).
Meanwhile I had become part of the Internet Applications team where I got to take over backup (IBM Tivoli Storage Manager) and monitoring (Nagios, Cricket and other smaller components) for a server park of around 300 servers with Linux, Solaris, Windows and AIX.
In 2006 I enjoyed designing and implementing the "Integrated Hotspot" product, a solution whereby end-user traffic originating from customer-owned WLAN infrastructure is transported over a L2 or L3 network to central access gateways providing the hotspot service.
Beginning 2007, the backup and monitoring was completely revised and handed-over to collegues. Now I'm spending more time delving into the core systems (DHCP, DNS, LDAP, Radius) and provisioning systems for access network devices (cable modems for example).
During 2007, Brussels Airport was successfully turned into a big Integrated Hotspot and the foundations were laid for Public WLAN on the Thalys trains together with Nokia-Siemens Networks and 21Net.
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Siemens |
2003-2004 |
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End 2003, the Sinfilo activities became part of Telenet (Belgian Cable ISP), except for the NOC which Siemens Belgium would now be taking care of.
I'm now taking care of the complete technical side of the Sinfilo network and NOC within Telenet, along with developing a platform to provide backoffice services for multiple smaller Wireless ISPs.
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Sinfilo |
2002-2003 |
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The IT industry had bad times, but a new technology was bound to be successful: Wireless LAN. The things I had learned at Siemens would be of great use to what I was going to do for Sinfilo...
At the time I started, the company wasn't founded yet. The people that started making the idea real were missing one element: technical skills.
I started with building a corporate network and getting experience with Wireless LAN products. After that, the time had come to roll out the Sinfilo network accross Belgium, which meant evaluating, installing, operating and monitoring WLAN clients & access points, routers, firewalls, gateways and servers.
By mid 2003, the network had grown to 80+ hotspots which relied on a redundant NOC based on a completely customized product of Garderos together with FreeRadius. Garderos customizations were necessary in the fields of security, availability, flexibility and customer satisfaction.
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Siemens Atea |
2000-2002 |
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From when I was 14, computers had become a big interest for me. The liquor store was great to work for, but I was keeping options open...
In august 2000, I was made an offer I couldn't refuse: a job at the R&D department of Siemens in Belgium, starting with a 3 months IT course in Cape Town, South Africa.
I started of with creating demos that showed potential customers such as Proximus how our solutions could be put to use. As I grew in the department, the range of jobs I was assigned became more diverse. I got involved in testing, comparing and evaluating some of our bigger products and I was creating specialized solutions for certain projects.
Besides the big products (like Siemens' Mobile Radius, Provisioning Server, Logging and Billing Servers, Location Manager, Openwave's WAP Gateway, Funk's Steel-Belted Radius, LPG Innovations' WAPOffice) I also developed my knowledge about standard technologies (like SQL, CGI, SMS, WAP, MMS).
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Dranken Lambert |
1997-2000 |
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After To The Point, I started working for Dranken Lambert, a liquor store in Antwerp, where I was responsible for the stock and deliveries to cafes and restaurants in and around Antwerp.
Again, I couldn't resist creating Accijn, a customs depot declaration program, something they were doing by hand up until then.
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To The Point |
1995-1997 |
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In July 1995, I started working for Ecobike, a startup courier in Antwerp, Belgium. My first real job!
As Ecobike had just started, they didn't have specialized tools yet to keep track of the package deliveries and generating monthly invoices. Since I had been programming a little with Turbo Pascal for Windows, I started making a program for Ecobike and 6 months later the Eco Dispatcher was born.
After 12 months, I moved from working in the courier company to working for To The Point, a sister company of Ecobike. To The Point was specialized in everything that needs extensive organisation skills. On the side they were also selling and installing computers. After a year I sometimes had a group of 30 people to manage in order to get an event ready.
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