How many of us have the time to keep current (or refresh our knowledge) on telecom topics that don’t affect our daily work?  I’ve recently had a couple of opportunities to improve my knowledge – one a webcast about a telecom technology, the other a blog post that helps define a newly hot market segment – that I’d like to share with you.

First, I can’t believe that it has been more than a decade since I last worked directly in the fiberoptics industry.  (My years working in the fiberoptics for KMI are also the reason I’ll always write “fiberoptics” as one word rather than two.)  Last week, I refreshed my knowledge of fiber basics by watching a “Fundamentals of Fiber Optics” webcast.  Available on-demand here on the Lightwave website, the presentation by The Light Brigade’s founder Larry Johnson serves as a solid one-hour primer covering the basics of how fiberoptics works.  Very worth viewing as a sort of refresher if you haven’t worked with the basics of fiberoptics for a while (as was my case) or if you’ve not been directly working with the theory of how fiberoptics work for a while.  Also a great introduction – something that might be worth sharing with newbies in your company.

The other interesting discovery this past week – this one definitional in nature – comes courtesy of CommScope’s blog.  Recently, I had been seeing a flurry of news articles about small cells.  This doesn’t affect my daily work, so I was comfortable with my general understanding of what small cells seemed to be, but in the back of my head I had thought I should someday devote a little time to Googling small cells just to make sure I wasn’t misunderstanding what I was reading.  Then, earlier this week, CommScope’s June 2^nd blog post of “What Exactly Is a Small Cell?” found its way to my inbox.  Adapted from Pankaj Gandhi’s May 22^nd post on ETTelecom’s TeleTalk blog (Small Cells: The solution to telcos’ network capacity challenges), this post serves as a nice starting point in accelerating my understanding.  Indeed, in it, Gandhi says “Small cells or small cellular base stations encompass a number of different technologies but one could describe them as anything that’s not a typical macro site.”  I’d suggest reading the entire blog post for more detail.

It’s always nice to find some shortcuts that help maintain or upgrade our understanding of the industry in which we work (and adjoining industries). I hope those two resources above are of assistance to you.  Please do feel free to share other educational resources, either by e-mail to me directly or in the comment section below.

Finally, before I close, I’ll add one more “learning tool.”  I don’t plan to make a note about this again; just, since so most of my readers right now are people I already know (industry friends, former colleagues, and contacts, many of whom don’t spend a lot of time reading blogs), I thought I’d share “how to sign up for blog e-mails.”   Look for the “Follow” button in the bottom right-hand corner of your browser window.  If you click that button, you can sign up to have my blog sent to your inbox whenever I update it.  As you can see, I don’t blog that often.  I can’t imagine it will ever be more than once a day, almost certainly not even that often, so I won’t fill your inbox.  Anyway, if you sign up for the e-mails, you won’t have to periodically click on your bookmark to my blog to see what I have to say.  (I also tweet on Twitter and pin a link to Pinterest whenever I add a new blog post, but you know how quickly those messages get lost in the feed, so e-mail is often the best way to make sure you receive each post.)