Comwave and Rogers: projects and timeline

Career path

I joined Comwave Networks in its network operations centre in 2017. My employment moved from Comwave to Rogers on 15 Nov 2023, with my 2017 service date kept.

1. Network Operations Associate (NOC), Jul 2017 to Jun 2020. 24/7 monitoring of voice, IPTV and internet; traffic re-routing to hold call-quality targets; wholesale voice provisioning (DIDs, number porting, 911, toll-free); VoIP fraud detection with SQL on call records; nightly maintenance from method-of-procedure documents.
2. Junior Network Administrator, Jun 2020 to Jun 2021. Level 3 support to the NOC with weekly on-call; root cause analyses for network-wide events; core and backbone maintenance; firewall firmware and Layer 2/3 changes; complex voice provisioning for wholesale and business clients.
3. Voice & Video Administrator I, Jul 2021 to Jun 2022. Tier 3 for voice and IPTV. The data-centre migration of the IPTV headend, STIR/SHAKEN phase 1 and the first certificate changes.
4. Voice & Video Administrator II, Jul 2022 to Oct 2024. Tier 3 for both platforms. BroadWorks security patching, SBC upgrades, the encoder firmware programme, the streaming-stick and mobile headend.
5. Voice & Video Administrator III, Nov 2024 to Feb 2026. Senior escalation point. The CMS cutover, the multi-domain certificate programme, the wholesale SBC refresh and onboarding new administrators.

Year by year

Hours and authored change requests come from my time records, which start in June 2021.

2021 (Jun to Dec): 725 hours, 22 changes authored

• CRTC STIR/SHAKEN phase 1 (54 h): call signing for wholesale traffic on the Genband QTX SBCs, 2 software upgrades with test plans and licences on 3 SBC pairs.
• Preparing the headend for the data-centre move (24 h): inventory, network and server readiness for encoders, packagers, DRM and cloud recording.
• BroadWorks (70 h): media server upgrade to RI 2021.11 to fix a call-control defect, application server licence and audit-trap patches, removal of obsolete releases to free disk.
• CDN origin change on production with the CDN vendor and the network team, with streams up throughout.
• Decommissioned the legacy Oracle 4500 SBCs; firewall IPS engine upgrades; IP transit BGP maintenance; a shared-line call-reject feature for desk phones.
• Started the certificate programme with the first wildcard renewals on the BroadWorks web and load-balancer tiers.

2022: 1,134 hours, 44 changes authored

• IPTV headend data-centre move (163 h executing, 209 h in all): encoder rounds 3 to 5, cloud-recording managers and streamers moved and promoted to master in pre-production then production, DRM servers, CDN storage servers and the monitoring probe. Case study
• Emergency Alert System on the packagers: configuration rolled out in rounds across the live packagers.
• Oracle SBC upgrade to SCZ910p1 (48 h): built and staged a lab (20 h), ran UAT for SIP trunking and mobile clients, then upgraded both production pairs; commissioned a replacement SBC unit and ran double failovers to prove it.
• Media gateway recovery: replaced failed SIP chassis cards after a regional outage and wrote the vendor log-collection process into the wiki.
• Moved news channels between primary and backup encoders, re-pointed third-party signals to new multicast groups, and supported the streaming-stick IPTV service (19 h).

2023: 1,314 hours, 32 changes authored

• BroadWorks security patching (83 h): patched all 10 production XSP servers in pairs, including the fix for CVE-2016-2183, with one re-attempt.
• Ribbon QTX SBCs (52 h): planned double failovers to move a carrier interconnect between realms, reset hash counters and restore call-record delivery to the fraud system.
• Number routing data (42 h): rebuilt the LERG import into BroadWorks with Voice Engineering, including a consistency check between the routing and access-control files.
• No-audio fault on wholesale calls (30 h): traced intermittent no-audio calls to a single media gateway board.
• Network security review (15 h): reviewed publicly reachable IPTV hosts.
• IPTV source migration and DNS resolver moves for the services-core refresh; VPN migration batches onto new tunnel aggregators; DECT phone firmware certification and roll-out; channel path and source switches.

2024: 1,322 hours, 41 changes authored

• Encoder and packager firmware, phase 1 (82 h): Cisco UCS firmware under the Ericsson Muse encoders and Halo Live packagers, one node per change.
• BroadWorks R25 preparation (74 h): patched the application and profile server clusters, then staged pre-production.
• Security hardening (84 h): a scan of the Linux voice and IPTV systems (61 h) and route clean-up on the SBCs.
• Headend for streaming sticks and mobile (43 h): DRM, CMS, packager, CDN and cloud recording; then the CMS and NTP cutover in November.
• Channel line-up: new channels, 17 SD to HD conversions including French channels, clear to encrypted switches, encoder input moves to the primary network.
• Moved voice monitoring from SolarWinds to OpenNMS (28 h, voice and pre-production nodes); supported the SIP trunk interconnect with Rogers with SBC failovers; recovered DRM after a certificate expiry.

2025: 1,386 hours, 24 changes authored

• Multi-domain certificate programme (139 h): moved the BroadWorks web, device and client services from wildcard to multi-domain certificates, tested self-signed and signed certificates in pre-production, and moved certificates from the load balancers to the back end and the web application firewall.
• Wholesale SBC hardware refresh (49 h in 2025): trained on the Ribbon SBC 5400 (47 h), staged the production unit and tested the first trunks on it; ran an enterprise SIP trunk proof of concept (22 h).
• Emergency alerting audit (55 h, started in late 2024): audited and corrected the channel setup on all 4 CDN alerting units for CRTC alerting.
• Network end-of-support replacement (27 h): moved the cloud-recording managers and streamers from the old to the new data-centre switches, including the database move.
• SIP-PRI (38 h): moved customer edge devices to cloud management and upgraded the management server.
• Encoder firmware phase 2; wholesale account onboarding (53 h); backbone router upgrade support; firewall vulnerability patching; encoder CPU recoveries.

2026 (Jan to Feb): 171 hours

• BroadWorks network servers upgraded to R25; the last multi-domain certificates; the routing data refresh; more SD to HD channel conversions.

Project ledger

The larger named projects in my time records, by area.

IPTV and video

Voice

Network, monitoring and security

Where the hours went

Projects are only part of the job. Most of my time went to keeping live services up and answering escalations.

By topic: about 289 hours on the QTX SBCs, 284 on the Muse encoders, 282 on cloud recording, 347 on certificates and 353 on work tied to the new data centre.

Support improvements

• Troubleshooting process for backup-encoder channels (Feb 2024): after a news channel could not be moved to its backup path, I wrote out the troubleshooting steps for the NOC.
• Better IPTV tickets (May 2024 onward): asked the support desk to include the key diagnostic details in every buffering, blurry or bad-picture ticket, and followed up on tickets sent to the IPTV queue without enough to troubleshoot.
• French channel deployment (2024): wrote the change steps for master playlists on the packagers.
• iOS app error: traced a TV app failure to iCloud Private Relay and put the fix in the support wiki.
• Wikis: an IPTV troubleshooting wiki for the streaming-stick service and a cloud-recording alerts guide, so support could act without escalating.

Training and people

• Onboarded and trained 5 new administrators.
• Vendor and platform training: Ribbon SBC 5400 (57 h), SIP School SSCA Elite, Webex UAT, and the yearly Rogers training programme after the move to Rogers.
• 294 hours of review work, mostly on change requests.

Stack