Odds are, your smartphone connects to a 5G cell network. As Marcos Cavaletti would tell you, the G stands for generation. Ericsson’s Ottawa site lead would know; he worked behind the scenes on five generations of telecommunications technology, and just last month hung up his hat as the company prepared for a future launch of the sixth.
Cavaletti started his career back in 1G. In the mid-1980s, he began work at the Brazilian telecom CPQD.
“We do something that is a human basic need: communication. This has brought me a lot of energy and passion.”
Marcos Cavaletti
He was meant to spend just one year in Ottawa, back in 2003, to work on 3G technology for Canadian telecommunications giant Nortel before returning to his home country. That didn’t happen.
“After six months, I got an offer to stay, and then we decided to stay for a couple of years,” Cavaletti told BetaKit. “But now it’s [been] 23 years; I’m Canadian.”
The engineer spoke to BetaKit as he walked through the Ottawa research and development facility he’s led for the past six years. He was dressed in a blazer, but it was easy to imagine him in a lab coat as he explained how wireless tech works. If a lesson got too complicated, he would cut it short and simply point to “physics.”
Cavaletti ran the facility on behalf of the Swedish telecommunications giant Ericsson, which acquired Nortel in 2009. At its peak, Nortel had accounted for a third of the value of the Toronto Stock Exchange and employed tens of thousands of people globally; in 2009, following Nortel’s bankruptcy, just 2,500 of those employees, Cavaletti included, landed on their feet at Ericsson. Despite the turmoil, Cavaletti says it was a good fit.
“I think the culture of the type of company that Ericsson is, and what Nortel was in terms of research [and] designing big systems, was very nice,” Cavaletti said. “We are always remembered as one of the best acquisitions in Ericsson.”
As Cavaletti walked by rooms hosting retirement parties and into radio equipment test chambers adorned with warning signs, it didn’t seem to be on his mind that he might be seeing those for the last time. The day before, he’d eaten some cake with his face on it. The day after, on March 27, he’d join last month’s wave of retiring Nortel veterans.
“Because we had that acquisition, a lot of people with a lot of experience [are] reaching that time,” Cavaletti said. “This is happening, it will continue to happen.”
Changing of the guard
Cavaletti was preparing Ericsson’s Ottawa site for the changing of the guard long before his own retirement. The facility has added more than 500 employees over the past five years, bringing its headcount up to around 1,700 people. The site also has a mentorship program to ensure institutional knowledge is being passed down to the “new blood.” Cavaletti said he has personally mentored somewhere between 15 and 20 employees in the last five years.
“We do something that is a human basic need: communication,” Cavaletti said. “This has brought me a lot of energy and passion … we are doing something that is good for society, for people, for the world.”
With Cavaletti’s departure, Ericsson Canada CTO Tania Leppert is the new site lead for the Ottawa facility. The McGill University alumna has been with Ericsson for more than 20 years and, much like Cavaletti, has served the company at various sites around the world. Whether she’ll assume Cavaletti’s duties as Santa Claus at the annual holiday party remains to be seen.
Cavaletti leaves big shoes to fill. Ericsson’s Ottawa lab, which is its largest research and development site in North America, has helped to support telecom companies like Bell, Telus, and Rogers as they have rolled out 5G across Canada. And they’re already working on what’s next: 6G, which Ericsson is preparing to roll out to commercial markets by the early 2030s. It has already been testing the tech for years, and its website claims that it will “take the industry significantly closer to fully autonomous network operations with zero human touch” and “bridge physical things, people and activities into a fully cyber-physical world where the digital and physical worlds as we know them today have merged.”
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Cavaletti’s timeline is a little more uncertain. Touring the facility, he seemed stumped when asked about what he’d do the following week as a retired man. Perhaps more time with his wife, his hobbies, and giving back to the community. But there was no grand plan. He was still the leader of Ericsson’s research and development complex in Ottawa, doing the same thing he spent four decades doing: developing technology with unforeseeable applications.
“6G will just continue to provide more capacity, more things that will enable things that we don’t even know,” Cavaletti said at the end of the tour. “You can now invent things that will work everywhere, [that] was not possible before.”
Cavaletti doesn’t know what the next generations of tech will hold, but it’s clear that he finds that idea thrilling. Maybe that’s why he’s keeping his future retirement plans unknown, too.
Feature image courtesy Alex Riehl for BetaKit.