Brief Summary

I have over 30 years' experience in the IT industry, most of which has been spent in networking/telecoms in the UK and Europe, where I’ve worked in varied roles such as technical consulting, network design/architecture, pre-sales support, operational support and software engineering/development. After emigrating to Wellington, New Zealand in October 2008, I worked in a number of roles for over 13 years. In March 2022, I emigrated back to the UK – mainly in order to be closer to family again.

My experience has been gained in a wide range of organisations, from start-ups, through enterprises and to large service providers and telcos. I have worked in both team environments and on an individual and independent basis.

My background has a strong hands-on element to it, and as such I get satisfaction from being able to test a design in a lab to prove that it will work before deployment in a production environment. To back this up, I have over 20 years experience with Cisco’s IOS, routers and switches, as well as more than 14 years experience with Juniper’s JUNOS, routers and NetScreen firewalls.

I very much enjoy customer-facing roles since no two customers are alike, and so the variety this gives is always a challenge that I am keen to take on. Taking part in in-depth technical discussions with customers forms a key part of being able to fully understand their requirements, which is essential to being able to deliver a successful solution.

Latest News and Useful Articles — Updated: 5 October 2022 —

• EVPN/MPLS bridging forwarding model. [ipSpace]

• What's wrong with network automation? [ipSpace]

• US and UK follow new rules on data sharing. [The Register]

• Netlab EVPN/VXLAN bridging example. [ipSpace]

• Ciena's multi-format 400G coherent QSFP-DD pluggable. [GazettaByte]

• QUIC is not a TCP replacement. [ipSpace] [Bruce Davie]

• Security vulnerabilities found in covert CIA websites. [Schneier]

• FBI catches ex-NSA employee trying to sell top-secret intelligence documents. [The Verge] [The Register] [Schneier]

• DNS evolution - innovation or fragmentation? [Geoff Huston]

• Fake CISO profiles on LinkedIn target Fortune 500s. [Krebs]

A more comprehensive news/article list can be found on my networks sub-domain here.

Click here for the latest full version of my CV, or find me on LinkedIn and Twitter.

rob (at) larsenconsulting (dot) net

© Robert Larsen. All rights reserved.