The Watershed Story

I left the navy in 1969 and took a job at New England Telephone, Installation and Repair. The work was interesting and I soon began to learn the complex network. It spurred my natural curiosity. I was attending college at night but but soon I transferred to a night job and I had to quickly learn the #5 XBar in Gloucester, MA so that I could go to school full-time. Over the next several years, working days and nights and weekends, I earned my degree from the University of Lowell.

When the Lucent Technologies introduced the 5ESS, I was at the Brighton, MA Control Center working on the 1A ESS. My offices included the Harvard Ware Street offices and the tandem office in Bent Street, also in Cambridge. I was very familiar with the technical library at the Learning Center in Marlboro where I borrowed and read many of the books on switching and in particular on the 5E. I worked on cutovers to the 5ESS in a number of regional offices and eventually wrote the maintenance methods for 5ESS and ISDN for the company that had become NYNEX. In 1990 I moved to Illinois to write and teach at Bellcore, writing courses on the 5ESS, ISDN, SS7 and intelligent networks. While I was writing and teaching, I also took advantage of other Bellcore courses and completed the entire Bellcore data networking curriculum.

The first packets had crossed the early Internet around the same time that I started at New England Telephone. Now, in the early 1990's, it became evident to me that the future of the telecom network involved much more than just voice.

In 1994, the year that Netscape Communications released its browser and began the World Wide Web, I moved home to Massachusetts and started at MIT as the operations manager for the school's private communications network. The ISDN capable switch supported only a minimum of ISDN data applications but we did have a modem pool of over 300 modems running at the blinding speed of 28.8 Kbps!

We noticed an interesting pattern developing in the switch utilization. The busy hour moved from 10 to 11 am up to 12 to 1 am. Many foreign students and peers in far off locations plus the lower phone rates made this the ideal time to communicate. At MIT's Sloan School I worked on an early distance learning program, using ISDN lines to spread a classroom around the world. It was clear that the internet marked a watershed in the history of communications and in the way that human beings would relate to one another. We tried to sell the idea to the rest of MIT but it was early and few understood the value of distance learning.

In 2001 I founded Watershed Networks to develop new ways of teaching using the Web. Working with a small but capable team I've realized my vision of a new way to teach, harnessing the potential of the IP network and a hard-earned knowledge of the telecom network. As the industry itself takes on the tough transition from circuit-switched to packet-switched networks, the need to educate, not just train, has never been greater. At Watershed Networks, we are constantly finding new ways to enhance understanding and communication in the learning environment.

-Walt Mansell, CEO