The Day We Migrated The Mobile Network

The moment the engineer from one mobile provider in the UAE pressed the 'Enter' key to send the IOS config that would move the mobile traffic in all UAE cities to new CRS Core on Thursday's early morning, my life during the past several months flashed before my eyes. I remember having heavy discussion with the team from Cisco and customer long ago on how to breakdown the project into multiple tasks (it turned into more than 16 different tasks in total!). I remember spending quite some time with the Project Manager just to count the number of resources required to execute all the tasks. When we started 9 months ago, it was difficult to imagine the day we would really migrate the mobile traffic to CRS. The two networks, Fixed and Mobile, required to be fully optimized before we can even connect the physical link between them. The two networks used to communicate through two routers designated as the Point Of Interconnect that we had to analyze deeply before we can move them to communicate directly over the CRS. And not to ignore the interoperability issues with mobile equipments from other vendors.

The only way to achieve success is by completing one task then another. We planned for one day, executed, then made the plan for next day. We handled the challenge one at a time. And after 9 months working together with the customer, countless hours of discussion and extensive lab testing, around 120 change request windows at night, the mobile traffic has finally been migrated.

We made history yesterday. And now it's time to move on.

So here I am, 48 hours later after the migration, sitting at Charles De Gaulle Aiport in Paris waiting for my flight to Mexico to do another project. I have been working back-to-back, from one project to another without any spare time, since the first time I ever worked for project. Some people I met like to complaint about that kind of work condition. For me I would consider myself lucky if I have a chance to work in only one big project at a time. I used to handle several medium size projects at the same time. The most challenging situation is when there is overlapped, the time when I have to work in another new big project while still handling the previous one with the same size or complexity.

Mexico, here I come.