Today is International Women in Engineering Day (INWED), which celebrates the work that women engineers all over the world continue to do to support our lives and everyday livelihoods.
Over the past year, we’ve seen engineers come together to play vital roles in using their skills to save lives, support economies and keep people connected during this difficult time, making this year’s theme of ‘Engineering Heroes’ more poignant than ever.
As the country went into lockdown, our services, both broadband and mobile, became vital in ensuring the country remained connected and kept moving. We saw our customers downloading an extra 2.8Gb of extra Virgin Media broadband data per day, doubled the capacity of our O2 voice core network in Spring 2021 to meet such unprecedented demand, as well as deploy temporary phone masts for many hospitals around the UK and kept critical infrastructure like hospitals, GPs and schools connected. All of this was managed by our incredible engineers who were key in ensuring our networks could cope with the huge surge in demand and gave our customers the best possible experiences as they kept connected to friends, family, colleagues, businesses and schools.
We spoke to two of our engineers who played a significant role in keeping our customers connected over the past year:
Name: Stacey Dunne
Job Title: Network Engineer Apprentice, broadband
What are your key responsibilities?
My job involves taking care of our network, upgrading, and maintaining our fibre cables, as well as finding and fixing any issues. I’m on the road daily.
How did your role change when we went into lockdown?
Being able to fault find whilst maintaining service for our customers has always been our key priority but became more important than ever with most of the country now at home. If there was a fault that was affecting customers’ services, it became even more vital that we find and fix it as quickly and efficiently as possible to ensure minimal disruption.
How do people perceive your job when you tell them what you do?
They are always very impressed when I tell them my job role. Women have been especially supportive – older women even more so – and as social restrictions have lessened, some customers have told me that they would have loved the chance to do this job. Customers are often surprised when I turn up on their doorstep to fix their broadband.
Why did you choose to go into engineering?
When I saw the role as a service technician advertised, it specifically highlighted a call for women to apply. I was working in an office role at the time and was after a more active role with a lot of variation.
What tips do you have for women looking to go into technical engineering?
Do it. Don’t ever think you can’t do it.
There is a lot to learn but just think of it as an exciting challenge. Don’t let anything cause you to doubt yourself. Is the role male dominated? Good, you will be a breath of fresh air! Think you’re too old? Age is just a number, and you cannot buy wisdom, that only comes with age. Never underestimate what you can teach others but what you can learn from others as well. We all have different life experiences and so regardless of our age or background, we can all learn from one another.
Name: Araceli Calle
Job Title: Head of Core Engineering, mobile
Previous roles: R&D Engineer, Circuit Switch data engineer, IP Designer
What are your key responsibilities?
I am responsible for Core Mobile Data, Voice, IP and Transmission and manage a team of over 150 specialists in Core Engineering. Our overall tasks are to plan, design, test and deliver our core Voice, Data and IP networks that support the key services provided to over 30 million mobile customers on the O2 network. In addition, we’re also supporting the journey to introduce 5G and virtualised solutions.
How did your role change when we went into lockdown?
Our focus turned to providing enough network capacity to serve the initial pattern changes we saw in how our customers were communicating.
As lockdown progressed, my team also helped to deliver zero-rating capabilities on key support websites for our customers. This meant all O2 customers were able to access select websites for free, including all NHS websites, victim support pages and access to charity info sites.
How do people perceive your job when you tell them what you do?
They think it’s quite ‘techy’.
Why did you choose to go into engineering?
Being curious about how things work and as a way to feed my need to learn as technology is evolving continuously
What tips do you have for women looking to go into technical engineering?
Be passionate and have the courage to try new things – there is always a first time for everyone
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