Title: Engineering Fellow
Company: CommScope
Location: Moultonborough, New Hampshire, United States
John Ulm, Engineering Fellow at CommScope, has been recognized by Marquis Who’s Who Top Engineers for dedication, achievements, and leadership in communications technology.
After obtaining a Bachelor of Science in electrical engineering in 1978, Mr. Ulm followed with a Master of Science in electrical engineering in 1979 from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. For more than four decades, he has flourished as a systems engineer and architect.
Mr. Ulm found much success as a senior network engineer with Burrough Corp. from 1979 to 1982, Canaan Inc. from 1982 to 1987 and Apollo Computer Inc. from 1987 to 1991 and Hewlett Packard from 1989 to 1991. In 1991, he was approached by Rouzbeh Yassini, who later earned the moniker of “father of the cable modem,” to work in his startup company, LANcity, to create a new technology that allows high speed data communication over residential cable plants that carry television programs into everyone’s homes, which was later utilized during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns in 2020. He notably excelled as a hardware architect with LANcity from 1991 to 2001 and Bay Networks from 1996 to 2001 and ARRIS International Limited from 1998 to 2001, and as a Senior Consultant with YAS Holding from 2003 to 2006. Mr. Ulm then prospered as a fellow of technical staff with Motorola Mobility LLC from 2006 to 2013 and with ARRIS International Limited from 2013 to 2019.
With LANcity, Mr. Ulm was a member of the team that created the cable modem. He developed the Media Access Control (MAC) protocol that enabled cable modems to communicate over tens and hundreds of miles; in what he considers to be a career highlight, he was primary author for the MAC sections of Cable Lab’s DOCSIS (Data over Cable System Interface Specifications) 1.0 and 1.1 releases, which have subsequently enabled more than a billion cable modems to be shipped since 1997. In addition, he helped lead the DOCSIS evolution through six generations, including today’s 10G initiative and Distributed Access Architectures (DAA), and is a renowned broadband industry researcher in network capacity planning, modeling and traffic engineering, which enabled millions of people to work from home during the Coronavirus pandemic bandwidth surge.
Since 2019, Mr. Ulm has served admirably as an engineering fellow with CommScope, a leading network infrastructure provider that designs and manufactures network infrastructure products for four business segments: home networks, broadband networks, venue and campus networks and outdoor wireless networks.
Mr. Ulm’s many industry accolades include the Distinguished Inventors and Innovators Award from ARRIS International Limited in 2020. He was also an inductee into Cable TV Pioneers with Inaugural DOCSIS class in 2019 and as a Motorola Scientific Advisory Board Member for Creative and Innovative Technical Contributions by SABA in 2012.
Mr. Ulm attributes his success to being grounded with a great family life. The key to achieving that is simply managing a good work-life balance. Additionally, over the years, he has been given the opportunity to think outside the box to figure out how to solve problems that have never been previously tackled. In the coming years, Mr. Ulm intends to start to slow down as he is looking forward to his retirement, enjoying the lakes and mountains of New Hampshire and the Carolina beaches, traveling more and enjoying visiting his grandchildren.
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