scte member focus
Member FOCUS Richard Reis DIRECTOR, Maus Technology
At the SCTE we take great pride in our individual members, who have made such a contribution to the growth and development of our industry. This section of Broadband Journal shines an overdue light on you wonderful people in every issue going forward, as well as regularly online.
baby to provide for I could afford to buy a house instead of rent. The rest is as they say history! You’ve had a varied career and have a lot of strings to your bow. How would you describe what you do, and what do you enjoy best? I would love to say it was all planned, but I just tend to accept any positive sounding opportunity that comes along, some winners and some losers, of course bracketed within my skill set: that’s to say, I am a very inquisitive geek that excelled at maths and physics and repaired old radios as a kid but failed miserably at field sports, so a career in football was out of the question. What memories really stand out for you over the years you’ve been involved in this industry? Growing up in a village in the Pennines where life was black and white, full of smoky chimneys, to travelling the world, experiencing so many different cultures, some good and some challenging, some hot and some freezing cold, but always pinching myself to see if it is true. I never thought in a million years I would be the guest of the Prince of Tonga being driven around in his personal London taxi on a South Pacific island paradise, having
What got you interested in a career in the industry when you first started? It was accidental really; in the mid 90s with an ex-military RF based background I was contracting on various projects which eventually led me to NTL’s advanced products division in Winchester, hand building and testing RF modulators for the new-fangled Digital TV concept. I was issued with a significant test and measurement budget, buying HP, Tektronix and Rohde & Schwarz high performance equipment. One day I got a rather cryptic call from Rohde & Schwarz in Fleet saying they had something at their office I should see. When I got there, I was asked if I would meet their CEO, Wolfgang. He put 3 brown A4 envelopes in front of me to review the contents as he nipped off to make coffee. One envelope contained a job description for a pre-sales engineer, one a JD for an installation engineer, the knockout was a job as a sales engineer for the UK Telco segment as the fledgling HFC roll out had just begun. The offer was twice my previous income, plus sales commission and a fully expensed company car, decision made on the spot, and I went back to NTL to give them the happy news. They understood when I showed them my new offer. I had not even gone for a job that day, especially changing to a sales focused role; it felt like winning the lottery. With a partially disabled wife and a new
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Volume 46 No.2 MAY 2024
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