Fred Simonds is an independent consultant, teacher and writer. Active in networking for over twenty years, he has participated in the industry's transformation from a mystical art employed only by corporations and governments into a workaday tool used by individuals from their homes.
Mr. Simonds' experience includes working at M.I.T. Lincoln Laboratory on an electronic air traffic control system called TCAS designed to keep commercial aircraft safely spaced from one another. TCAS is in use today worldwide.
Following his work at M.I.T., Fred spent four years with Motorola Codex as a modem designer and field engineer. In these positions he helped develop new modem hardware and supported major Motorola accounts such as IBM and Bristol-Myers.
In 1981, Fred was hired by Racal-Datacom as an applications engineer. In this sales and technical support role, he had responsibility for gaining new major accounts for the company, which came to include Chase Manhattan Bank, Avis Rent-a-Car and MasterCard International. His responsibilites included all aspects of the sales cycle from pre-sale presentations and responding to RFPs to post-sale configuration, staging, installation and training.
During this time he became Regional System Sales Manager for the Northeastern United States and was based in New York City. This position involved the training of sales, technical support staff and customers in the use of Racal modems, multiplexers and network management systems. Here he was also involved in the first deployment of token ring LAN technology in the United States.
Mr. Simonds became an independent consultant in 1990. Since then he has taught hundreds of courses in telecommunications and data communications domestically and in Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany and Belgium. Subjects he teaches include T-carrier systems, LANs, WANs, ATM, Frame Relay, TCP/IP, client-server networking, APPN, cellular telephony (AMPS and PCS), and applications of technology for the Help Desk.
He has written many courses on wide area data communications, LANs, TCP/IP, network management as well as custom training curricula for AT&T, IBM and others. He teaches at all levels, from executive overviews to technician-level hands-on. He has been an adjunct professor at Pace University in New York since 1991.
Today, Fred actively consults for a variety of well-known clients through his company, Data Dynamics. For instance, his work saved one client over $360,000 a year on their data network costs without any additional capital investment and required no changes to their network. The same approach netted another client $62,000 in annual savings.
To date, Fred has published two books, The McGraw-Hill LAN Communications Handbook and Network Security, Data and Voice. He is actively at work on two more.