Voice platforms, 2007–2018
Between 2007 and 2018 the phone network stopped being hardware and became software. I spent those years at Tel4Tel and FCP, moving from administering VoIP systems to leading the voice team.
Context
I started in 2007 administering VoIP at Tel4Tel: call flows, SIP trunks, codecs, gateways. In 2011 I moved to FCP — technical support first, network engineering a year later, then VoIP specialization and eventually managing the voice function through 2018.
The problem
Voice is unforgiving product territory. Users notice a broken call instantly — everyone from a CEO to a grandmother — and the system spans analog handsets, ISDN lines, IP networks and carrier interconnects, each with its own failure modes. When a call breaks, 'the network' gets blamed; finding which layer actually broke is the work.
Why it mattered
For the businesses we served, telephony wasn't a feature. It was revenue, safety, and sometimes the only line to their own customers.
My role
Across the years: administering production VoIP platforms; answering the phone when things broke; engineering the networks voice ran over; designing NGN and Cisco voice platforms; and finally leading the people who kept them alive.
Constraints
Legacy everywhere: equipment designed decades before IP, interconnects with monolithic carriers, customers who couldn't describe their own call flows — and voice's hard real-time constraint. Latency and jitter aren't degraded UX; they're broken calls.
Discovery
Answering the support line was the best product education I ever received, years before I heard the word discovery. Every ticket showed how systems actually fail and how people experience the failure. Reproduce, isolate, verify — the one skill that has outlived every technology I've used since.
The decision
As the voice lead: which platforms to standardize on; how to structure the team so knowledge lived in systems and documentation instead of one expert's head; and how to keep physical-layer thinking alive in an IP world that preferred to forget it.
Trade-offs
Deep specialization in voice was narrowing; the compensation was knowing one vertical end to end — signaling, transport, switching, and the organization around them. Managing meant solving problems through people instead of my own keyboard, which felt slower and turned out to scale.
Outcome
Voice platforms designed and operated for real customers over years, and a team that didn't depend on any single expert.
What I learned
Voice was my first infrastructure product: invisible when working, binary when broken. Every product principle I hold has a telephony ancestor.