Group chairs

Lisa Garza is a Marketing Manager focused on the global Service Provider Mobility Market at Cisco. Lisa has over 10 years of experience in strategic technology marketing for service providers – covering technologies from the core of the network to the edge, across multiple fixed and wireless access technologies. In this capacity Lisa also maintains a focus on key industry standards organizations – she is a former member of the DSL Forum Board of Directors.

Today Lisa is responsible for solution marketing around some of the key mobile access technologies that deliver quality broadband into homes and businesses.

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.

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 Vice-Chair of the Small Cell Forum from 2009 and was appointed Vice President, Americas in September 2012.

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.

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.

Viraj has been chairing the Backhaul SIG since its inception in December 2011. He has over 14 years experience in the telecommunication industry working on various areas such as WiFi, 3G, LTE and lately on outdoor small cells. He regularly presents at leading conferences in the industry that focus on thought leadership.

He is currently working as a Strategist in BT Wholesale looking at future growth opportunities and their commercial implications. He has worked on research and innovation for 7 years in his career. He has worked in BT research labs, based in Adastral Park, UK and predicted the demand for small cells in his research papers. He read for a Ph.D. at the Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge completing in 2003. He completed his B.Sc. in Electronic and Telecommunication Engineering at the University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka in 1998.

Neeraj Gupta has over fifteen years of experience across Technology Strategy, Standards, Architecture/Systems Engineering and Product development in the telecommunication domain.

He is currently working as Senior Manager in NEC UK managing NEC 3GPP Standardisation, Technical Marketing and LTE End to End Small Cell solution portfolio development programs.

Prior to that he worked for Motorola responsible for Technology and Solution development in the Voice over IP domain .

Neeraj has a Masters Degree in Telecommunication Networks from Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur and a Bachelors degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering from Aligarh University, India.

Richard has over 25 years of experience in the telecommunications industry, holding senior level positions in R&D and Engineering working closely on voice, data and transmission network systems. In his current role Richard is currently responsible for leading iDirect’s engineering and marketing approaches for satellite backhaul solutions.

Prior to joining iDirect, Richard was Managing Consultant position at PA Consulting Group and later Questus Ltd where he focused on mobile systems: GSM and 3G systems in particular. He has been involved in a large range of mobile related activities from architecting the world’s first shared 3G network to leading the design of a range of network planning tools. Richard has written several well-known books and published many articles on subjects ranging from 3G power amplifier efficiency to network sharing and of course many pieces on the use of satellite backhaul for 2G and 3G networks.