Geoff Wilbur – Telecom and Technology Industry Career

My 25-year high-tech career has included more than 15 years solely devoted to the telecom industry. In addition to more than 8 years working for telecom carriers, I have consulted in a variety of telecom markets including FTTH, CLECs, ILECs, Wi-Fi, Fixed Wireless, and cable television. I have performed a variety of quantitative and qualitative analyses -- market research, market analysis, financial/cost/economic analysis, etc.

Even before my career began, I studied telecom at Michigan State University (before adding an MBA from Boston University).

I worked for 6 1/2 years for the Michigan Exchange Carriers Association, reaching the title of Director of Cost Analysis. While I was there, in addition to managing access revenues and Lifeline, we created and spun off a CLEC, worked on universal service issues, and handled a variety of analyses and negotiations for our member companies.

I then spent 4-plus years as an Industry Analyst for KMI Research, studying the fiberoptics market -- especially fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) (click here for the press release to my groundbreaking FTTH report), fiber deployment by CLECs and ILECs, but also other areas of the market (fiber deployment by utilities, remote fiberoptic test systems, the high speed optics and dark fiber markets, rights-of-way trends, fiberoptic cable deployment methods, fiber deployment in Brazil, etc.) as needed. (KMI moved from Newport, RI to Providence, RI while I worked there. It has since become part of the CRU Group.)

After that, I spent about ten months attempting to establish my own consulting firm. Though open to work in all of my areas of expertise, I was focusing on "last mile" technologies. I researched and began following the Wi-Fi industry in addition to the fiber-based last mile markets (especially FTTH) I had previously followed. I had no trouble finding interested parties -- former colleagues, prior business contacts/customers who had found my analysis invaluable in the past, etc. -- and bid as a subcontractor with my former employer KMI on one or two occasions, but budgets remained constrained by the depth of the recession, and interest was too slow in turning to income, so that led me to my next position.

Then I spent more than 2 years as a Senior Economic Analyst at CenturyTel. I did some really interesting work -- developed models, performed pricing and cost analysis (tariffed and single-client pricing and costing and internal cost analysis), worked on some interesting initiatives (inlcuding early Metro Ethernet pricing), and was part of an incredible team -- but my wife was unable to advance her career in Monroe, LA, so...

In late 2005, I left CenturyTel to join New Paradigm Resources Group as a Telecom Industry Analyst. There, I rose to the position of Director of NPRG's Industry Analysis Group. I performed industry analysis of various telecom market segments. I authored the Fixed Wireless Carriers Report (press release here), completed in Spring 2006. After that, I led the teams that wrote the 2nd Edition of the Cable Broadband & Telephony Report (press release), the Metro Ethernet Report (press release), and the 21st Edition of NPRG's Competitive Carrier Report (press release). I also wrote articles about a variety of telecom industry topics, including broadband power line technology, Ethernet over bonded copper, overviews of GlobalComm 2006 and NXTCOMM 2007, a review of the cable industry's advances in on-demand technology, discussion of broadband wireless and fixed wireless technologies, and more. In addition, I co-wrote an article about the competitive carrier industry that appeared in Xchange Magazine. (Scroll halfway down this page to see links to the articles I've written.)

In the second half of 2007, I joined International Planning and Research. The move to IPR was an opportunity to explore an adjacent high-tech industry and rejoin a couple of friends and former coworkers back in New England, while putting my quantitative analysis skills to good use. At IPR I performed global market sizing and opportunity analysis, primarily in the IT industry, but due to my propensity to quickly gain a sufficient level of knowledge to provide insights into markets I hadn’t researched before, I was frequently tapped for non-IT analysis projects that fell outside IPR’s usual core competencies, as well. At IPR, I researched and forecasted a variety of tech and non-tech areas, including (but not limited to) servers and other IT hardware, supply chain management and logistics outsourcing, air conditioning systems, the e-payment industry, global financial products, global population migration and remittances, and smart parking. I also attended industry conferences and presentations featuring AI, AR/VR, IoT, and other cutting-edge technology to stay current with the newest trends in the tech industry. Beyond specific tech analysis, I also constructed IT market-wide geographic deep-dive coverage of several countries and of a variety of individual IT and technology vendors. While at IPR, I was also able to showcase my skills at process improvement (I redesigned a 4-6 hour daily critical process to 10-15 minutes), new product design, client relations and development, and staff management and motivation. In early 2019, after 40 years in business, IPR closed its doors.

After that, I increased my attendance at industry conferences and seminars, focusing on events in the IoT, cybersecurity, AI, telecom (lately, of course, mostly 5G), data center, and general tech and telecom industries. I also helped some small and startup companies with market sizing and planning projects, continued to blog, and pursued some analyst work.

And in late 2019 I joined IDC's Imaging, Printing, and Document Solutions group as the Research Manager, Print Forecasts. In this role, I bring my years of industry analyst and top-shelf forecasting experience to a relatively new industry. So far, it has been fun and exciting.

My Telecom and Tech Blog:

In August 2012, I started a telecom industry blog to give me a place to share articles and opinions on the many segments of the telecom industry in which I've gained expertise and keep abreast of new developments.

Click here to check out Geoff Wilbur's Telecom and Tech Blog.

Of course, since I've joined IDC, I've stopped adding to this blog. Still, even though it's now dormant, you can still read all of the things I wrote pre-IDC.

If you want to follow the blog, you can do it via WordPress or via an e-mail subscription through the blog's website. Also, I made three more ways to follow the blog: 1) I created a Facebook page to which I posted whenever I blogged. You can follow ("like") this page. I may still post to it when I'm out at tech events, even though I no longer blog; 2) I created a board on Pinterest for the blog. Each time I posted to the blog, I added a pin to this board on Pinterest. 3) I also tweeted (follow this link to my Twitter account) every time I posted. I also Tweet frequently about telecom and tech, so please do follow.

In the News:

While with KMI Research, I was quoted several times in the media.

I also have some writing available online, much of which is from my time at NPRG.

And, of course, I expect to be quoted and see some writing online with IDC.