Phone workers brave remote locales,
high peaks and meager provisions
Today, the equipment is smaller and can go anywhere
By Mark Heinzl
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Dec. 26 — Last December, Joshua Caldwell spent
four anxious days in a tiny structure on top of a
remote mountain, trapped by a raging snowstorm.
The communications-equipment installer could
take only one small bit of comfort from his plight:
He was making a killing in overtime pay. Nortel
Networks Corp. had dispatched the 23-year-old
installer to Alaska to help three other technicians
develop a cellular network.
Brutal winter weather had grounded the helicopter that
carried them to the site.
Forced to rely on the meager provisions kept for such
emergencies, the four men rationed themselves to a single
meal a day of canned soup or chili. When they got back to
civilization, Mr. Caldwell headed straight for the nearest
shower.
Such adventures are all in a day’s work for today’s
telecommunications-equipment installer. As new networks —
mostly for wireless phones and other devices — penetrate
the most remote and dangerous corners of the globe, working
for the phone company has gone from being humdrum to
downright daring.
A decade ago, telephone-equipment installers mainly
worked with bulky equipment in phone-company central
offices or in places readily reached by wire. Today, the
equipment is much smaller. It can go anywhere, and is
needed everywhere. Thus, tens of thousands of
wireless-equipment installers around the world may find
themselves working on a remote mountaintop or in a desert
as well as in a city’s nooks and crannies. Nortel, a giant
maker of telecommunications equipment based in Brampton,
Ontario, has 6,000 installers working around the globe, one of
the largest armies in the industry.
Some places are scarier than others. Nortel executive
Pat Praysner, who is in charge of Latin American operations,
says installers in Colombia are routinely assigned security
escorts, and the company checks with military and police
officials before sending employees into remote locations.
Nonetheless, when installers were working on a cell site
in Colombia a few years ago, guerrillas approached them
declaring that they were about to blow up the site. The
guerrillas backed off and left only after the installers
explained that blowing up the site would disable the very cell
phone the guerrillas were using.
In a different part of the world, some Nortel workers
find the Cold War hasn’t thawed completely. In Russia, “the
biggest obstacle is Customs,” says Nortel manager Alex
Talis, a Russian emigrant who has long lived in the U.S.
Customs officials once even blocked him from bringing in
global-positioning equipment he needed to do his job.
Installer Brent Thomas doesn’t need global-positioning
equipment to know where he has been. He just spent about
three months working on a cell site on St. George Island, a
speck of land in the Bering Sea between Alaska and Russia.
The cell site serves fishing boats in the area. Mr. Thomas’s
work has been delayed because high winds often prevent
landings of the plane that is supposed to drop off equipment
and other supplies twice a week for him and the 140
islanders.
His lodging was a
small guest house with no
staff and no other guests.
He often cooked up veal
and reindeer — “It tastes
like sweet chicken,” he
said — and he recently
watched some hunters
spear a seal and skin it from the island recently.
He learned to pass the time taking walks and talking to
locals. “People think this is small. To me, this is big,” said the
native of Kanorado, Kan., population 50.
To get a rugged, professional installation staff that can
cope with guerrillas and seal dinners, Nortel often seeks
military veterans. “The military provides the best possible
training” for the job, says John Traylor, a senior Nortel
installation manager who was in the Army himself. Warning
potential recruits of possible hardships, he tells them about the
time last year when employees in Paraguay were evacuated
because of upheaval caused by the assassination of the
country’s vice president.
But installers find that some of the scarier experiences
occur right in the U.S. Take David Nanse, who has become
street smart traveling 48 weeks of the year as a Nortel
installer. Working late in a rough neighborhood in Philadelphia
recently, he was approached by some young men who
threatened to take his car unless he gave them money. Mr.
Nanse knew how to handle the situation: “You carry some
fives with you and bill them to Nortel as parking,” he says.
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On another job in Pompano, Fla., Mr. Nanse arrived at a
cell site to find some tough-looking men guarding the
entrance. One pulled back his jacket to reveal an automatic
gun and demanded to know what Mr. Nanse was doing
there. After Mr. Nanse said he needed to upgrade the cell
site with a new switch, the gunman let him pass. A colleague
explained to Mr. Nanse that gangs often guard cell sites
against other gangs who try to shut down competitors’
communications.
Nortel installer Al Blackburn remembers getting lost at
midnight on a deserted road on the outskirts of Nashville,
Tenn. A pickup truck suddenly drove past and cut him off,
and a farmer jumped out with a shotgun “raised in my
direction” and yelled, “What are you doing on my property?”
Mr. Blackburn recalls. He showed his Nortel jacket and
identification and said he was looking for a cell site. The man
gave him directions and let him go, Mr. Blackburn says. He
says he isn’t sure to this day why the farmer stopped him but
notes that moonshiners sometimes clash with government
officials in the area.
On an earlier job in the U.S. Virgin Islands, Mr.
Blackburn was working on a mountaintop cell site when he
spotted a hurricane coming his way. He and a colleague
jumped in their car and, he says, “just barely made it out”
before rain washed out the cow trail that served as their
road. Constantly working away from home and family can be
difficult, Mr. Blackburn says, but he’s not about to give it up.
After working as an installer for 20 years, eight of them with
Nortel, he says, “I wouldn’t know what to do in an office.”
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