Fred R. Goldstein

Fred R. Goldstein is the principal of Ionary Consulting.  He advises clients on technical, regulatory and business issues related to the telecommunications, cable and Internet industries, especially in areas where they overlap.

Some relevant examples of his experience include:

• He has worked with numerous Competitive Local Exchange Carriers (CLECs) on network design and procurement issues, including the selection of switching and transmission equipment, the preparation of collocation applications, design of their networks, and service delivery strategies. He helped a number of existing CLECs respond to a changing regulatory climate, helping plan their migration from the Unbundled Network Element Platform (UNE-P) to switch-based operation (UNE-Loop or wireless local loop), often broadening their service profile in the process.
• For an organization preparing a request for stimulus funding to build a regional middle-mile network, he played a leading role in the network design for the winning proposal. Using GIS tools, he laid out over 1000 miles of fiber optic routes, reaching targeted community anchor institutions and potential user sites.
• For a state’s Attorney General, he provided consulting and expert testimony in several matters concerning allegations of anticompetitive actions by incumbent local exchange carriers.
• He led the technical design and field level design efforts to design a statewide fiber optic network, to support multiple state agency networks and public safety applications including Enhanced 911.  This included GIS-based design of several hundred miles of new fiber routes to state facilities, incorporation of existing fiber from various sources, and the development of a technical architecture based on DWDM, Carrier Ethernet, and SONET.
• For a large cable MSO with a large and rapidly-growing PacketCable telephone service, he designed a technical strategy for taking over its PSTN interconnection from a third party.  He prepared a detailed forecast of required interconnection facilities, including relevant capital and operational expenses, based on applying PSTN traffic engineering methodologies in context of several interconnection agreements.  He then provided ongoing assistance through the migration to the new network, dealing with issues such as traffic analysis and cost optimization.
• He has worked with CLECs on intercarrier disputes, helping resolve billing questions that could lead to a cutoff of their interconnection to incumbent carrier networks.  This often included determining exactly what the correct billed-for service should have been, compared to what was actually billed for, and identifying ambiguities or errors in ordering or provisioning processes.
• He has provided expert testimony before several state regulatory agencies and the Federal Communications Commission, on behalf of Internet Service Providers and Competitive Local Exchange Carriers, primarily focusing on the technical and economic impact of interconnection agreements and intercarrier compensation. He has provided direct support to law firms on matters concerning telecommunications, particularly in areas that involve the overlap of regulatory, legal and technical issues
• He worked with a wireless startup to help prepare a backbone network design, taking into account requirements for backhauling voice, data and control traffic, and prepared cost models of the resulting network proposal.
• He provided a strategic plan to a Voice over IP supplier to help it start its own multistate CLEC, in order to help it gain direct access to numbering plan resources, minimize its costs, and earn potential revenue from intercarrier compensation. He helped select the media gateway hardware and call agent software, negotiated with equipment vendors and carriers, designed their trunk configuration, and prepared the necessary forecasts needed to commence operation.
• For a major cable MSO, he analyzed options for entering the wireless business, analyzing potentially available frequencies, using Geographic Information Systems tools to profile the reachable population for licenses which the company was considering acquiring, estimating likely license auction prices, and identifying potential products and technologies that could be used to provide advanced wireless services.
• For the United States Department of Energy, he co-authored the reports Energy Consumption by Office and Telecommunications Equipment in Commercial Buildings, Volume I:  Energy Consumption Baseline and its companion Scenario-Based Projections of Residential Office and Telecommunications Equipment Energy Consumption in 2005 and 2010. These identified total nationwide power consumption by network and computer equipment, as well as wireline, wireless and Internet service providers.
• For a major bank, he participated in the redesign of the corporate backbone network architecture following its merger with another bank of nearly equal size. This involved the creation of a new network architecture based on an IP core network, supporting a hierarchy of regional and local networks. The new design accommodated the individual requirements of the various business units within the bank while providing the economy of scale of a single company-wide network.
• For an Internet Service Provider seeking to broaden its capabilities in a rural market, he examined available technologies including Fiber to the Premise (FTTP) and Hybrid Fiber-Coax (HFC), produced a business case for a “triple play” HFC network overbuild providing cable TV, Internet Access and telephone service, and assisted the company in developing a new network architecture.
• He assisted a European manufacturer of advanced packet telephony switching equipment in determining market requirements for North America, identifying gaps in its existing product line and prioritizing potential product enhancements.
• He has assisted various CLECs with business modeling, negotiating interconnection agreements, and with the use of unbundled network elements to provide both basic and advanced services, in both urban and rural areas.  He has created geographic and spreadsheet models to provide CLECs with alternative scenarios for Digital Subscriber Loop deployment, which quantify the potential subscribers reachable by different loop technologies in their selected market areas.
• For a large radio and television broadcasting company, he analyzed their program transmission, data and voice networks, to help them determine the most appropriate protocols and architecture for building a new integrated backbone network.
• For an overseas manufacturer of telecommunications equipment seeking to create a presence in the North American public network access equipment market, he led a case identifying several potential new niche products that were in a specific target market size range.
• For an MSO considering its options for becoming a Competitive Local Exchange Carrier serving business customers in and around its cable footprint, he performed market analysis, provided a graphical overview of potential subscribers within its planned service area using Geographic Information Systems tools and related databases, and provided market-entry pricing strategy focusing on areas where the incumbent carrier had its highest profit margins.
• For a worldwide provider of electronic travel reservation services, he analyzed its network requirements both from a business and technology perspective.  He helped develop a business strategy to assist with its bandwidth and common carrier services acquisition during a time of rapid carrier consolidation, and developed a global network architecture to facilitate widespread network migration to TCP/IP.
• For an information services network provider that had recently merged with a privately-held Internet Service Provider, he assisted in performing a third-party valuation of the ISP’s business.  Due to the highly inflated share price of Internet stocks at the time, this included both an enterprise value, based on likely future cash flow and profitability, and a comparative-worth analysis, based on share prices of similar companies at that time.
• For a provider of satellite services, he analyzed the competitive marketplace for satellite, terrestrial wireless and wireline data communications systems, helping them identify and quantify the most promising market opportunities for their planned satellite-based digital communications services.
• For a major on-line service company’s access provider spending several hundred million dollars per year on telecommunications services, he developed teletraffic analysis and forecasting techniques and tools, helping them optimize a nationwide modem access network whose sustained growth exceeded five percent per month for several years.
• He developed a technical strategy for the Computer Integrated Telephony business for a major computer company, leveraging the company’s core competency in LANs and Application Programming Interfaces to provide a set of tools that could be applied to vertical and horizontal markets.
• He represented a company at the ANSI-accredited technical subcommittee that initially developed Frame Relay, ATM and ISDN standards, where he developed congestion control and avoidance standards for Frame Relay and ATM networks, and participated in the development of various protocols which became standards.

Since founding Ionary Consulting, Mr. Goldstein has assisted numerous clients, primarily competitive telecommunications service providers (cable, ISP, CLEC) and their suppliers, with technical, regulatory and business matters.  He has been employed by Arthur D. Little Inc. in its Communications, Information and Electronics practice, and by TIAX LLC. He was previously with the Network Consulting Practice at BBN Technologies, a unit of GTE Internetworking. He was earlier employed by Digital Equipment Corporation as an in-house telecommunications consultant, and as a strategic planner and product manager in its Networks and Communications business.  Before that, he was corporate telecommunications manager for Bolt Beranek and Newman, after working for the consulting firm Economics and Technology Inc.

He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Skidmore College. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE. He received three patents in the area of Asynchronous Transfer Mode technology, including two for methods of congestion control and avoidance, and one for a LAN-oriented ATM switching system. He has been a member of the faculty of the State-of-the-Art Program at Northeastern University, and has taught courses on ISDN, Frame Relay, ATM, telecommunications transmission, and OSI and TCP/IP protocols. He has also taught several satellite courses on ATM, Frame Relay and ISDN for National Technological University.

He is currently a columnist for TMCnet, a major technology web site, focusing on Telecom Policy issues. Articles include:

Fiber Dividend or New Digital Divide?

Embracing Failure:  The FCC’s Disastrous Internet Policy

Living in the Past

After Comcast, Can the FCC Order Network Neutrality?

The Net That Got Away

What Does It Mean to be Internet?

Universal Service: Uncle Sam’s Blank Check

Of Network Privacy, Neutrality, and Turtles

The Dismal Reality of Internet Management

Quality of Service Doesn't Justify IMS Walled Gardens

Intermodel Competition: The Internet's Threat to Telcos

The Tyranny of the Low Home Phone Rate

Net Neutrality and the Internet Video Red Herring (also published in Internet Telephony, April 2006)

How Big Ed Torpedoed Lucent, and Other Stories

Spectrum Banking: How the FCC Creates Scarcity

Network Neutrality is an Answer to the Wrong Problem

Selected publications include:

The Great Telecom Meltdown, book published by Artech House, 2005.

The Telecom Blame Game, guest column in CNET News.com Perspectives series, October 2002.

Enterprise Network Strategy After the Bubble (co-author), article in Business Communications Review, February 2002.

Cable Should Take a Fresh Look at Access (co-author), article in Multichannel News, Oct. 18, 1999.

ISDN In Perspective, book published by Addison-Wesley, 1992.

Trends in Communications Management, editor and principal writer, 1980-1987. Newsletter published by Telemation Management Group, New York.