Luke Fowler

I’m an Integration Engineer with Ericsson Australia and have been in this role since I started as a grad in 2020 – I fell in love with my first rotation and made the decision to stay instead of rotating to another project. A big part of the reason why is the fact that I get to work so closely with the customer, and our own hardware – I’m a hands-on person by nature. I spend almost all my working hours in a customer lab in Melbourne’s East, where I’m surrounded by extremely knowledgeable people and some of the latest mobile tech in the country.

7.30 AM

I slide out of bed – a challenge on these cold Melbourne mornings – and don my Ericsson polo and hoodie. By the time I wake up, feed the cat and pack my gear for the day, it’s already 8:15, oops! I rug up warmly and hop on my motorbike to begin my 40 minute commute to the lab.

9.00 AM

I arrive at the lab, fire up my laptop and start catching up on any mails or messages that have arrived overnight, making a note of any action points or urgent tests I need to run today. Every day is a mystery in the lab – you never know exactly what you’ll be working on. Being in a continuous deployment (CD) project, I have my normal backlog of software to verify and features to test, however I also need to be flexible enough to deal with any issues that pop up out of the blue. And there are lots!

9.30 AM

Last week I was in South Australia testing a customer software feature. It was a great trip with wonderful weather, fantastic views and most importantly a successful network test!

So today, I am planning to summarise my findings and perform some follow-up tests to confirm my results. However, I receive a message from a colleague saying that a software fix for a known fault has been discovered and could I please test it urgently. At the same time the lab manager swings past my desk and asks me to help him out with some patching in the lab. Looks like my day’s work is cut out for me! I begin upgrading our model network basebands with the new software.

10.00 AM

While the upgrades are running (this takes about half an hour) I start to write up the results from last week. The customer is keen to make a press statement about my findings, as well as use them to drive future network-design decisions, so it’s important to get this done ASAP! Luckily it doesn’t take too long, just plopping my results into an excel sheet, whipping up some graphs and attaching a few photos. Easy!

Meanwhile, the upgrades have finished. I log into the node and make sure everything looks normal. The node isn’t crashing anymore, so it looks like the fix worked! I let my colleague know, who will forward the logs to our development team in Sweden. Even little tests like this help our software team make better software, ultimately improving the reliability of our products.

11.00 AM

It’s time for a part-social-part-work call with my team. We chat about what we did on the weekend and any fun things anyone has coming up, before moving onto project talk and running through the plan for the week. This is a good chance to hear about what everyone else is working on, contribute to the discussion and get an idea of where the customer’s network is heading in general. This in turn feeds back into my own work, by letting me know what to expect. For example, this week the customer is starting to ramp up their network-wide upgrade plans, which means that I’ll likely have more software to test than usual over the next couple of weeks.

12.00 PM

Lunch time! A group of the engineers in the lab go for a walk down to the local shops, grab some baked goods and head back to the lunch room to make coffees, socialise and generally relax for a bit. The lab is pretty unique in that we get to kick back with some of the customer’s bright minds in this more informal setting. It makes a nice change from meeting formally on Teams, and provides me with the opportunity to network and learn from people that have been in the industry a very long time. Everyone is very open and genuinely passionate about telco and technology in general, so there’s always good discussion to be had.

1.00 PM

Time to actually use the lab as a lab. I use some special pre-release phones to test new network functionality in our dedicated model radio network. This is one of my favourite parts of the job – getting to play with brand new toys and make them do things that very few people have done before. Sometimes I’m the first one in the world to attempt things! Even in my short time with Ericsson, I’ve managed to achieve a handful of world records. Maybe not as exciting as diving off the world’s tallest springboard… but still a fun thing to tell my friends!

3.00 PM

My line manager comes into the lab for a visit. Everyone always loves it when she visits because she brings cake! Today’s no different, and there are cupcakes all around. It’s only Monday, and the customer buys everyone donuts on Fridays… gotta pace myself!

3.30 PM

Time to help out the customer around the lab. They need some radios set up and patched via an attenuator into a screened box, so that they can run some tests on a particular 5G band. It’s sometimes hard to avoid manual labour in the lab, but for me, this is just another reason why I love the job. Where else do you quite literally get to get your hands dirty with some of the latest radio tech in the world? It just adds to the variety that keeps this role interesting for me.

4.45 PM

It’s meeting time with Sweden. We meet up every week to ensure that we are working on the latest and most relevant features for the customer. It also gives us a direct line to the development team to raise any issues and fast-track fixes for the customer. All in the name of faster deployment for better customer satisfaction!

5.30 PM

The day flies! There’s still plenty to do, but I’ll leave it for tomorrow. Ericsson supports a healthy work-life balance, so who am I to say no? Back on the bike for the homeward commute, where I’m greeted at the door by my cat. He knows what’s up. It’s time for dinner and Stranger Things, then off to bed to rest up for tomorrow’s adventure!