Group chairs

Rupert Baines has eighteen years' experience in technology marketing, working on commercializing many leading-edge technologies. He spent six years with Analog Devices in Boston, working on semiconductors for GSM and wireless infrastructure before managing the company's broadband product line and holding responsibility for the industry-standard ADSL chipset. He has also worked for operators, most recently as Director of Product Development and Strategy for Atlantic Telecom, where he ran a large pan-European DSL rollout and trialed wireless broadband deployments.

Rupert has been on the Forum's Board since 2007, and serves as Chair of the Marketing Working Group.

He has a BSc from Hull University, an MBA from IESE, and is a Fellow of the Institute of Engineering and Technology (FIET).

Outside of Small Cell Forum, Nick founded ip.access in 1999. Until 2006 he led the engineering team, delivering the profitable nanoGSM products to the business. He then led ip.access' 3G femtocell technology into partnership with Cisco and the world's largest femto deployment with AT&T.

After two years with customers and partners in the USA, he has returned to the UK to lead the business's next generation technology activities, including LTE and multi-standard basestations and networks.

Nick has a PhD in Microwave Scanned Imaging Techniques from University College, London, and an MA in Physics from the University of Cambridge.

Stephen Priestman was appointed as Chair of Working Group 4 in October 2011, having served as Vice-chair since October 2010.

Stephen’s career has spanned radio engineering, regulation and public policy work. Until 2009, he was a senior manager in Vodafone, responsible for co-ordinating spectrum policy across the Vodafone group and engaging with regulatory/policy bodies on spectrum issues.

Prior to that, he worked for Alcatel in various regulatory and policy roles, including Director of European Regulatory Affairs for the ‘SkyBridge’ broadband satellite project. Stephen also spent several years in the UK Radiocommunications Agency, where he gained extensive experience of UK, European (CEPT, ETSI, EU) and global level (ITU) regulation.

His early career was in broadcast engineering R&D. Stephen holds a BSc in Electronics and is a Member of the UK’s Institute of Engineering and Technology.

Femto is the only technology that enables real-time low-delay service seamlessly: from coming out of cellar, having a glass of wine in a wilderness resort, boarding the ship and mooring in a packed port without losing IP connectivity once.

No wonder, after 13 years in telecoms with Siemens and NEC, I gladly joined Small Cell Forum. It was only natural to make a full circle from doing UMTS protocol tests, SW development, system design, work on femto system architecture, to come back to do tests (now Interoperability Tests). Through IOT group plugfests we want to achieve seamless service between different vendors. Anyone with passion for languages, good food and hard work should join IOT group and work with people from around the entire planet.

Karim Sharf graduated with an MEng in Electronic and Mechanical Systems and has over 18 years of extensive experience in the certification and regulation of many areas of the telecoms industry. His principal experience is in the field of digital telecoms, such as ISDN, SDH and xDSL, and he has participated in a number of international forums and standards development projects. Karim actively participates in the Broadband Forum and the Small Cell Forum, where he is the Chair of the IOT SIG and editor of the test documents. He won the Forum's Chairman’s award in 2010 for his work towards an open and interoperable eco-system.

Andy Germano has over 22 years of telecoms and wireless experience including large company (Verizon, Nortel, QUALCOMM) and start-up companies (Tantivy, WiDeFi, AuthenTec).

Andy Germano was appointed Vice-chair of the Femto Forum in July 2009.

Andy has experience working in engineering, product management and business development and marketing across the femto eco-system including: carrier, infrastructure, consumer electronics and semiconductor for both wireline and wireless (GSM & CDMA) ventures. He is a member of IEEE Standards Association and was involved in the creation of the 802.16 standard as well as participation in several other 802 wireless standards (802.11; 802.15).

Andy was also instrumental in the creation of the WWINA (Wireless Wideband InterNet Access) standard as part of the T1P1 via 3GPP. Andy has an MBA from Duke University and a BS in Electrical Engineering from Pennsylvania State University.