MICHAEL

Professional Experence:

• 20 Years in Telecommunications with Southwestern Bell (Now AT&T)
• 25 Years in Data Network Design Management with MCI (Now Verizon)
• Currently Happily Retired

Major Technical Education:

• Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering, 1973
• University of Houston, Houston, TX


• Advanced Technology Innovation, 1990
• Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA


• Elements of Communication Technology, 1975
• Bell System Center for Technical Education, Lisle, IL

Michael and Shane
with Vint Cerf

IP Address Signed
by Jon Postel

Working with Vint Cerf and Jon Postel
to Globalize the Internet

Michael started his career in Telecommunication with Southwestern Bell but he later got a passion
for Data Networking. Michael got the privilege of working with Vint Cerf who many consider to be the
"Father of the Internet" for the role he played in developing the routing protocol TCP/IP and for
leading the development of the Internet Society that oversaw the globalization of the Public Internet.
Michael got to work with Vint and the Internet Society as they oversaw the great work of the Internet
Engineering Task Force and held conferences all over the world to trained international talent on how
expand the Internet in their region of the world.

Michael also worked with Jon Postel on ISOC. Jon played a key role in developing the Internet domain name
systems and IP address management. In the very early days of the Internet, researcher's would invite Jon
for a coffee and ask for an IP address so they could use the Internet for their research. He would grab a
napkin and assign their IP access on the spot. So, Michael got Jon to "assign" him an IP address on a napkin
for fun. Note the IP address is not a valid IPv4 address.

ISOC Deligation in China

ISOC Meeting in Shanghai China

Michael and Shanghai's Internet Lead

Co-Leading an International ISOC Delegation to
meet with the Chinese Government and Tech Leads

Recognizing the significance that the Internet would play for conducting global business, the Chinese government
invited the Internet Society (ISOC) to meet with them in June 2000. Michael got the honor of being a co-leader of
an international ISOC delegation that met with top Chinese government officials and data networking engineers to
discuss China opening their Internet network with the rest of the world. At that time, China Internet bandwidth
connection to the rest of the world was much less that US cities such as Houston.

The first meeting was with China’s Minister of Information Industry, Wu Jichuan, at the Chinese government headquarters
in Beijing adjacent to Forbidden City at Tiananmen Square. After passing through three heavily armed security check
points, we were taken to a conference room and served delicious tea in beautiful china cups and dishes. Minister Jichuan
opened the meeting by welcoming us then saying “We like Internet but you must remove the unnecessary information” which
was basically everything the government did not want their people to hear. We responded that the Internet was a free and
open platform for the exchange of ideas. The two major sticking points in the meeting were the freedom of information
exchange and data encryption.

The Chinese government invited the ISOC President to be a keynote speaker at Chinese equivalent to an ISOC conference. Our
ISOC President delivered his speech in English and interpreters translated it into Chinese except for the part of his speech
that stated ISOC supported free speech and encryption over the Internet but the Chinese interpreters said something very
different and unrelated for the Chinese participants to hear.

The Chinese government provided guides for our entire trip and gave us special meals and shows that included eating at the
restaurant that Richard Nixon ate, a special showing of Chinese opera and tours of the Great Wall of China in Beijing and
the Terra Cotta Warrior Museum in Xian China.

Michael got to lead the ISOC meeting in Shanghai with the Shanghai Telecom Authority’s top Internet Engineering staff. That
meeting started several networking relationships with various countries and China.

MCI Global Network Engineering Team

Managing MCI's Global Network Engineering Teams

Michael joined MCI in August of 1990 with a passion for getting them into data networking services especially Transmission Control
Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) Layer 3 networking services. Over the years, he got to manage several outstanding international
caliber network engineering teams. In the early years, Michael lead MCI’s effort to get into Layer 2 network services such as Frame
Relay (FR,) Switched Multi-megabit Data Service (SMDS,) and Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) services.

When the National Science Foundation (NSF) released a Request for Proposal (RFP) to replace the NSF Network which was used for major
United States research, Michael lead the MCI team who’s response won the NSF’s core networking award.

Then Michael got the management role he dreamed of when he joined MCI to manage the elite network engineering team for MCI’s Private IP
(PIP) network. PIP was a global private IP network that was parallel to but separate from the Public Internet designed for national and
global corporations to run their internal business with the power of the TCP/IP protocol stack but safe from the hacking of the Public
Internet. Michael’s network engineering team was the global design authority and worked with MCI’s regional capacity management teams
all over the world who built out their regions part of the PIP network. Managing the Private IP team was the perfect way to finish
Michael’s career.