Is telecommunications a dying field? I am considering a career move but not sure. It all depends on what you mean by "telecommunications", and what your perspective is. Way back, long time ago there was an entire industry around delivering bulk coal to your home or business for you to burn in your furnace for heating. We don't have coal delivery or coal-furnace service & sales anymore. But every home and every business has some form of heating solution. Just about every employer needs telephone services. I mean the smallest employers can just burn their cell phones, but everybody larger than a startup will want "a corporate number" and so on. Telecommunications (meaning telephone services) used to require a large, expensive technology stack. Well, it can all be done in the cloud now, or you can just pay somebody else to do all of the complicated stuff for you. But somebody needs to know how to hook up the physical phones (if you aren't ready for Soft Phones) and understand the features and capabilities to help the business safely work their way through the minefield of options and capabilities available from a service provider. There is still work out there performing those services. But it's so cost-effective to leverage the hell out of a service provider now, the total work-load is reduced so much it's kinda hard to justify a full-time, dedicated telecom person in anything smaller than a very large environment. Employers and especially their Contact Centers value a stable & reliable telephone service. There is money to be made in the larger environments. Real, good money. But in all the smaller environments, you'll probably be asked to take on other, more traditional IT Support duties in addition to the telecom responsibilities. More on reddit.com

The problem is that most of what people get exposed to early in their computing experiences is the stuff that runs on top of the network. Gaming runs on top of the network, which leads to server administration and Linux exposure and database systems and software development and the like. That's the most common path into advanced computing for most people, and the network is just something that sits between them and what they're trying to do. When the network breaks, it's usually well outside of the control of what they're able to influence so they don't get exposed to it. Even within my IT program I went through (admittedly close to 20 years ago at this point), the routing and switching classes were 400 level classes - not because they were inherently more difficult, but because conceptually people just hadn't been introduced to the topics and most people would take other paths away from it. I regularly see people asking about why networking is so hard and the answer is that it largely isn't, it's just that you're introduced to everything else first without being introduced to the networking concepts until much later in life. If you don't have the networking background, telecom largely becomes an afterthought. If you do develop an interest in networking, you usually start learning what you can get your hands on - you're buying a lab with gray market switches and routers to test enterprise solutions because, again, that's where most people will go. The problem for getting people into the telecom field is that most people don't go out and homelab stuff like DSLAMs and CTMS terminals or GPON OLTs or DWDM line systems because it's a lot of work and a lot of cost to get into a small niche. So what are the paths to getting into telecom? It's usually going through a NOC or doing field work. Having been in the field early in my career, most of the field techs are basically limited to installing and they need to be motivated to move into field engineering, and frankly most people just aren't that interested in learning it. It's a job to them and they're not inherently looking at how to dig into the knowledge but instead are focused on how they can do their day to day stuff as easily as possible. A fiber splicer is interested in how to do fiber splicing better but often doesn't get exposed to the gear that's running over the fiber. Installers are often out there running fiber and racking up gear but rarely interfacing with the equipment as well. People have to want to climb that ladder, and you'll find that a lot of people in life just want to be somewhere comfortable. More on reddit.com

Telecom is chill if you know what you are doing, it can be a very rewarding job and thats part of the reason they are so chill. I enjoy showing people around DMARC rooms and data centers because those rooms are normally secure and not seen by people who don’t have a reason. I enjoy showing them what the backbone looks like and the expensive equipment it connects to. Telecom has fed my family for over 25 years, I love what I do (telecom engineer). More on reddit.com

It is important to note that the ... in the telecom box at the building. I went and took a flance at the box, which is in prettu bad shape. I also asked a resident from the block across the street and their internet is working fine. Since I am no technician, is there anyone ... More on reddit.com