Dragan Nerandzic
Ericsson Canada
CTO
Work Experience
- Chief Technology Officer, Ericsson Canada, since last June. “My role is to make sure frequency bands and specific requirements related to Canada are properly addressed in Ericsson’s portfolio so we can bring these solutions into the market, connecting Canadian industry, including the IT industry, in a new way that has not been seen before. With HSPA in particular, we’re talking about high data rates. Peak data rates are 14 Mbps. That, I believe, is going to create a new experience for users in terms of data communication.”
- Manager of Access Strategic Technology Planning for Bell Mobility, late 1990s. “It was a great change for me. At that time, the industry was very immature. My first project was related to analogue mobile networks, which I was designing. The great thing about this industry is that there is very short time cycle between what R&D and academia provide and what is industrialized. I was able to apply my theoretical knowledge directly into real-life experience.”
- Teacher in the Faculty of Electrical Engineering at the University of Belgrade. “I came to Canada with only two bags in my hands, but I also came extremely well prepared. From an education perspective and training perspective, if I am giving any suggestions or advice, I would say you have to understand where you’re going and what are the needs in that particular country.”
Education
- Master of Science degree in Telecommunications and Computer Networks, Protocols and Switching, and a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from University of Belgrade. “What attracted me is that the telecommunications field was so rapidly growing. When I graduated, mobile networks as we know them today did not exist at all. It was just science-fiction at that time. In the late ’80s-early ’90s, the assumption was there would be two million mobile users by 2000. Well, we have two billion.”
Special Skills
- Actively participated in standardization and industry organizations including 3GPP2, TIA and CDG. “What I saw was that the telecommunications industry was the industry that enabled the growth of other industries, especially the computer industry. When we think about computers today, we think about connected computers, we think about networks. We take networks for granted because they’re not always visible. The network is not a concept that is easily touchable.”
Career Objective
- “I want to see my contribution to the industry evolving in a way that wireless data connectivity and wireless IP connectivity becomes predominant. We’ve just started on that path. Today, we have about 250 different HSPA devices. Out of those 250 models, about 100 of them are phones. The others are different form factors. Expanding connectivity beyond phones will make human life simpler and easier. My objective is to see the industry develop in this completely new dimension.”
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