Brendan Kearns is a Chartered Engineer and former Network Architect at Eircom, who significantly shaped Irish telecommunications infrastructure over three decades.
From Bell's accidental discovery of the telephone while trying to improve telegraph systems to Ireland's transformation from 50% manual exchanges in 1979 to today's fiber networks, Brendan reveals the engineering breakthroughs that built modern communications. His comprehensive guide traces the path from Morse code to AI and quantum computing, sharing tales of underwater cable failures that led to heat equation breakthroughs, why an undertaker invented automatic switching, and the cybersecurity challenges facing today's networks.
THINGS WE SPOKE ABOUT
● How the telephone was accidentally invented
● Why Ireland's telephone infrastructure was decades behind in 1979
● The engineering challenges of laying the first transatlantic cables
● How automatic telephone switches were invented by an undertaker
● Why successful engineering leadership requires small collaborative teams
● The cybersecurity threats facing modern telecom networks
GUEST DETAILS
Brendan Kearns is a Chartered Engineer and former Network Architect at Eircom, who significantly shaped Irish telecommunications infrastructure over three decades. He transitioned from an avionic technician to a Network Architect, leading critical infrastructure decisions and contributing to international standards. He is now an author, with his book "Evolution of Telecommunications" tracing the journey from Morse code to 5G, AI, and quantum computing.
Connect with Brendan:
● Book: "Evolution of Telecommunications" available on Amazon.ie
MORE INFORMATION
Looking for ways to explore or advance a career in the field of engineering? Visit Engineers Ireland to learn more about the many programs and resources on offer. https://www.engineersireland.ie/
Engineers Journal AMPLIFIED is produced by DustPod.io for Engineers Ireland.
QUOTES
● "We engineers, we're very inquisitive people. We do like to break things from time to time. That's necessary, but then you have to fix them afterwards". - Brendan Kearns
● "Sometimes practice can come before theory. You can't wait for the theory to be written first. You gotta do things to make things happen". - Brendan Kearns
● "The telephone was invented by Bell in 1876, but he wasn't trying to invent the phone - he was trying to improve the telegraph". - Brendan Kearns
● "Engineering is the art of giving something flesh, in my opinion". - Brendan Kearns
● "I always like to work on small teams, no more than four or five people, where everybody is completely engaged and where everybody is honest with what they know and don't know". - Brendan Kearns
TRANSCRIPTION
For your convenience here is an AI transcription:
Dusty Rhodes 0:00
Hi there. My name is Dusty Rhodes, and you're welcome to AMPLIFIED the Engineers Journal Podcast.
Brendan Kearns 0:07
We engineers, we're very inquisitive people. We do like to break things from time to time. That's necessary, but then you have to fix them afterwards.
Dusty Rhodes 0:19
Today, we're meeting an originator in Irish telecommunications, the man who has helped drive transformation in the industry from the early days of ISDN to the complexities of AI and even quantum computing that we have today. As a former chartered engineer and network architect with Eircom, he's been at the forefront of critical infrastructure decisions, and his work has influenced not just here in Ireland but in international standards as well. He's here to share some of the stories from his brand new book, Evolution of Telecommunications, which is an ambitious guide to comms, from Morse code to the future of our connected world. I'm really looking forward to having a grand old chat with Brendan Kearns. How are you?
Speaker 1 1:00
I'm good. Dusty, how are you doing today?
Dusty Rhodes 1:02
Brendan, you've spent an awful lot of your career with Eircom, and you've been in telecommunications and phones. I kind of really wanted to start this bit by asking you about the telephone, because most people are probably listening to our podcast on a smartphone. They're everywhere. Yeah. Is it true that the telephone, way back when, was invented by accident?
Brendan Kearns 1:24
Actually, yes, that's true, because let's put it in context. The telephone was invented by Bell in 1876. Morse code, the Morse telegraph itself was invented in 1844 by Morse. So there's a gap there, 26 years, when Bell was working on his experiments, he was trying to improve the telegraph. He wasn't trying to invent on the phone,
Dusty Rhodes 1:48
And the telegraph is with the Morse code, so you're just doing “di - dit - di”.
Brendan Kearns 1:52
That's right, yeah. I would think that the telegraph really was inevitable. It had to happen somehow. Yeah. The system in France, for example, called the Chappe system, where they had about 500 towers, physical towers around France. And they were single from one to the other. And physically, I mean, with no flags and with pointers, they had the ability to get messages very quickly from one place to another. In the time of Napoleon, actually, when Napoleon was planning his invasion of England, which never happened. Of course, he asked for this system to be available at night-time, and they tried their best, but they couldn't. So it was a good system for the day. And there are many other types of systems on a telegraph, which were all superseded by Morse code.
Dusty Rhodes 2:39
So Morse code was the currency of the day. Di-DIT that and all that kind of stuff. What was the accident? Then that happened that changed it from those dots and dashes into voice.
Brendan Kearns 2:48
They were working on a system Bell and his colleague, Watson, were working on, where they would be able to send multiple messages over the same telegraph. And they're doing this by frequency modulation, so they could send one message at this frequency, a lower frequency, this apparatus had a thing like a mouth organ. Like if you open up a mouth organ, you see little reeds in there. And one day, Watson was tghtening up one of the screws on the reeds, and it slipped, and the audio signal was transferred to the next room into Bell, where he was, so he then decided that he was going to change his tactics. He'd been backed by his future father in law to do this. His Father in law thought that this was a bad idea, that nobody was gonna be interested in the phone.
Dusty Rhodes 3:41
Who would want to talk from one distance to another when you've got dit, dit, da, da, da,
Brendan Kearns 3:45
Exactly, yeah. And he thought modification remorse was more of a sure thing, yeah. So Bell had to, when he put in his patient application. Eventually, for the first phone, he'd make it sound like it was a telegraph. The language he used was very general. So his father wouldn't cop on what he was doing, but eventually, when he got a second phone going, then he could be honest with them, and they told him everything lined up after that.
Dusty Rhodes 4:11
Is there any record of that first accidental communication when Watson was in one room and his assistant was in the other, and they, I can hear you, what were the magic words? Was it something profound?
Brendan Kearns 4:23
No, actually, there were two accidents. One accident was that - the one I described, and this one was when Bell spilled some acid on his lap and said, Watson, come here, please. That was the one. Watson, please, come here. That's the famous quote for that second accident.
Dusty Rhodes 4:43
Ain't it funny? It's just something that happens, a completely random thing and a twist and turns. The book is full of stories of radio communications, early communications, and then telecommunications, and right up to today, it's very comprehensive and fascinating. I have to say, there's some great other stories. Stories I wanted to ask you about. There was an example in the book about laying the first undersea cables between Ireland and Wales, I suppose. And there were some quite unique engineering challenges in that. What were the engineers of 200 years ago? What was the problem they were trying to fix with the cable?
Brendan Kearns 5:14
Well, I think you're referring to the cable between Kerry and Newfoundland.
Dusty Rhodes 5:21
There was one before that, I believe, between Ireland and the UK. But the same problem, I think, as well with the transatlantic one.
Brendan Kearns 5:26
Yeah, when the information was transmitted here, there was a pulse, a little pulse of electricity going through this cable. By the time it got through to the far side, it was so smeared out that it was difficult to decipher that pulse. It flattened out because of the capacitance of the transmission line under the Atlantic Ocean, 3000 kilometres long. It was delayed as well and smeared. The engineers at the time thought that if they increased the voltage, they could solve the problem. But this wasn't the case, because the guy called Lord Kelvin - temperature Kelvin scale, he was around at that time too.
Dusty Rhodes 6:09
And that's him, is it?
Brendan Kearns 6:13
Yeah, yeah, he actually had a bit of a dispute with the engineer, he says, to the engineer don't increase that voltage. And he increased it, and the cable failed. For that reason, the voltage is so high, it couldn't take anymore and broke down. So what Kelvin actually discovered was the equations which governed how the pulse went through the line were related more to heat, the heat equation, and nothing got to do with electronics at all. That's how we knew for sure that was going to work if they made the insulation thicker.
Dusty Rhodes 6:46
That's amazing. So the engineers at the time didn't know this because they'd never done it before. So that was trial by error, even though the facts are already out there in the world. Yeah.
Brendan Kearns 6:55
Well, this happens a lot in engineering, where sometimes practice can come before theory. The biggest example might be Michael Faraday. He didn't have a very strong theoretical foundation, but he was a superb one of the greatest experimenters of all time. He was constantly watching out for these little mistakes or these little tricks. He was the guy who discovered a magnetic induction. You know, in other words, how do you create electricity? He's the first one to create alternating current. So later on, then in his life, when he saw Maxwell's equations, Maxwell's equations were James Clerk Maxwell. He was a genius. He died young, and he produced these four equations, which show you how electrical energy is transmitted through the air. When he thought he's equation, he immediately knew they were, like a summary of his whole life, these four equations. And he wept, very emotional about that.
Dusty Rhodes 7:53
So it's something like, you know, he was learning as he went along, and developing his equations as he went along, which is interesting, because in Silicon Valley and in telecommunications today, I mean, there's a phrase, move fast and break things, and that seems to be how they learn. That's what they're doing with AI, look, just put it out there in the world, and we'll see what happens, and we'll regulate it afterwards. That kind of it exactly. And they were doing that 200 years ago when they were laying the first transatlantic cables.
Brendan Kearns 8:17
Yeah, they were. And if they didn't do that, it would take much longer. You know, you can't wait for the theory to get to be written first. Yeah, you gotta do things that make things happen.
Dusty Rhodes 8:27
And write about it later. I think another good example of that is possibly the invention of the automatic telephone switch, which I believe involved a funeral director.
Brendan Kearns 8:38
Oh, yeah, that's right, because when first the telephone was invented, you know, you needed some way to get people together, so for people to call it the first test and use was just manual, just patch cards. So this guy is called Stroger. He lived in the Midwest, in America. He was an undertaker. Actually, his competitor's wife was the operator in the local exchange. So when a call came in for, you know, looking for another taker, he wasn't gonna get that call.
Dusty Rhodes 9:11
She put it through to her own husband?
Brendan Kearns 9:15
Yeah, I can't even imagine what his thought process was, but he put a small model together of an automatic switch, yeah, which in a system is your rotary dial. As the rotary dial went around, you got these pulses. And the pulses actually, they move a sound in a certain sequence, yeah, yeah, tick, tick, tick.
Dusty Rhodes 9:38
Yeah, yeah, tick, tick, tick, you know the Yeah, that's what the clicking sound was. Yes, yes, wow, that's amazing. I'm learning so much!
Brendan Kearns 9:44
So the very first automatic switch, 1891 I think
Dusty Rhodes 9:48
I was about to ask you that, because 1891 then you fast forward 90 years, all right, to Ireland in 1979 shortly before, I think. You might have been just getting involved there at that stage, but anyway in 1979 the Irish telephone system was a mess. And if I'm not mistaken, 50% of exchanges in Ireland were still manual in 1979!
Brendan Kearns 10:12
That's right. So the government, I think, Taoiseach Jack Lynch and Minister for Telegraphs, was Albert Reynolds. They asked for this consultant to come in, and he wrote this report called The Dargan report. It recommended that he split the post and telegraph into two parts, one for post and one for telegraph.
Dusty Rhodes 10:35
What did they call the telegraph side of I know and post was just An Post, but what was the telegraph side? Telecom Éireann. Oh, it became Telecom Éireann in the early 80s. Okay.
Brendan Kearns 10:45
So they made a deal, Albert Reynolds. He got Ericsson and Telecom Eireann in the same room, and he told them he got this deal together to change the network so that we could get rid of these manual switches and these old technologies and replace them with digital technology, digital switches. You walk into a room where the digital switch is silent. When you walk into a room with a cross bear or with Scrounger or step by step, you know, the old technology based on relays and solenoids, everything you call was you'd hear it. You know, there's a seeking as it passes through the matrix. They did an amazing job. I think they by the time Telecom Éireann was actually formally created in 1984 they already had 30% of all the exchanges done. I mean, they were all digital. There was a good start for Telecom Éireann.
Dusty Rhodes 11:31
That was a great start, considering the mess that was in, like in the late 80s. You know, 100,000 people just on a waiting list in Ireland, 100,000 people on a waiting list for telephone in 1979 it's 1979 It sounds crazy. When did you come into the picture then Brendan?
Brendan Kearns 11:45
Early 90s. I joined Telecom Eireann in September 91, and at that time, almost the entire network had already been digitised, but the part from the local exchange to the customer was still analogue. So this is where ISDN came in, and GSM, actually, yeah, ISDN and GSM, that's the mobile version of ISDN. They use the same protocols, the same types of signalling. So to the engineer, they look very much alike, but of course, they're very different in reality for the customer. I was in charge of the ISDN field trial at the time, and we worked together with the marketing people to make people aware that's coming along. ISDN was more for business people, I think, than for residential users.
Dusty Rhodes 12:30
We used it extensively in radio at the time, because we would have voice over people in the States. And the way would be done is they would do the recording. You'd listen on the telephone to make sure they got the pronunciation right. And then they would put a tape in the post and it would be FedExed. And you'd have to wait 24 or 48 hours. Then ISDN came along, which is, it is integrated digital services network, something like that.
Brendan Kearns 13:24
Is it Integrated Services Digital Network?
Dusty Rhodes 13:24
Ah, I see, there you go. Grant, all right. But all of a sudden I had this box in my rack in the studio, and I was able to dial a number of another ISDN, somebody in the States, and he came through my speakers in full proper quality. It was amazing. We were able to do the recording there. And then that, at the time, was life-changing. And now, when I see my wife talking to her sister in Melbourne, Australia for four hours at a go with video and everything it's it's huge, how we came on with so ISDN, was, was one of your things. Were you involved in the early days of the internet as well?
Brendan Kearns 13:28
I didn't really have much to do with the Internet. I mean, once I moved across into our consultancy division from the engineering side in about 2000, it was only then that I really discovered how important and how fair reaching this new protocol, this TCPIP protocol, was going to be as in a course one time I remember in the telephone network, each individual exchange has their own routing table. Somebody got to go in there, into that routing table to make sure that the calls can be through the network. I was very impressed with IP because it has this ability to share the roofing tables automatically from one node to another. Of course, the internet initially had been designed to survive a nuclear exchange, a think tank called the Round Corporation in America. And they asked this guy, Paul Rand, to figure out Paul was the best type of network that could survive this catastrophe. He invented packet switching really that way.
Dusty Rhodes 14:21
So if I get this right, you're talking it's packet switching, okay, which is a digital way of routing something so like many of the other things you talked about, if you had say, say whatever, the eight or 10 computers in a network, and that was the internet, and the two middle computers were gone the packets, instead of routing the way through, the central computers would find other ways around, and it would do it automatically, and therefore you have the redundancy built in. And even if there was a nuclear war and certain servers were taken out, the internet would continue to operate.
Brendan Kearns 14:55
Yes, this is true. That's very well said there, Dusty. If a link wasn't available, then the routing table would be automatically updated from other nodes in the network.
Dusty Rhodes 15:05
And then keeping in that line was automatic switching and digital technology, and everything. So the internet was coming along in the early 90s. Back in that time, if you wanted to connect to the internet, you would have to have a modem in your computer called and it would be connected to your telephone line, and you would get all these squiggly noises and stuff like that as it connected. We're way ahead of that now with broadband and fibre technology and stuff like that. The rollout you were saying from the late 70s with the telephone network was the rollout of broadband in Ireland as a successful rollout.
Brendan Kearns 15:39
It all happened very quickly, actually, because I remember in about 2000 an analogy called Ed ESL appeared, instead of making a phone call using your modems to the network, and then, you know, it was expensive because it was a time-based thing. EDL gave us the ability to connect customers, maybe, you know, fairly close to the telephone exchange, and that bypasses the telephone network all together. It was a customer just like today. This goes into a different broadband network. Ed ESL was the first of those technologies. The first VDSL came along. Ed ESL means a synchronous digital subscriber line. Then VDSL, very high speed, and then then it went all the way up until today we have fibre,
Dusty Rhodes 16:29
Yeah, and then you got fiber to the calendars, and then fiber to the premises and all that kind of stuff like, you know. So can I ask you, as an engineer, all of these things are changing, because everything we've spoken about has changed, really in the last maybe 30 years, which in the grand scale of things is not really that long, especially when you're talking about massive, you know, infrastructure. How did you handle going from technologies that are just getting faster and faster and require a new rollout? Oh, no, we have another new rollout. Now we've got another new roll out. Did your head not, you know, fry?
Brendan Kearns 17:04
This is one of the problems with networking, because everything, it's all about different technologies working together. If you change from one technology, one part of the network, it has it kind of implications for everywhere in the network. And that's, that's one of the reasons that testing and protocols and the standards organisations for telecoms, they're very, very important. And ISDN was nothing but a standard. I mean, at the beginning, ISDN was just something that they wrote down on paper, and then afterwards it came into reality. Same with GSM horse and these standards ensure that we have some that all operators in the world have something to work towards. We're not held up by human lots of proprietary hardware, lots of proprietary protocols. Then you could be held up to ransom by your vendor.
Dusty Rhodes 17:58
You weren't able to move fast and break things, is that what you're telling me?
Brendan Kearns 18:03
Yeah, when you have standards like that, you're operating to something very exact test cases to do, and they're all written down first. Yeah, yeah.
Dusty Rhodes 18:13
Listen, let me get back to the book, because we're kind of up to the today part of the book, and you touch on subjects like cyber security, what do you think is the single biggest security problem that you see in today's large-scale telecom networks?
Brendan Kearns 18:27
I think it's probably something like spam text, or spam calls, which are now being aided by artificial intelligence. Now it's possible for somebody to get a voice recording and use that voice recording then to make a phone call to somebody. They something like, Oh, I'm stuck here. I need some money. Please help me. Yeah, these voice recordings, they're becoming so realistic, it can be hard to know...
Dusty Rhodes 19:01
You don't know what to believe.
Brendan Kearns 19:03
And also, the other thing that artificial intelligence is doing, it's making it easier for the those bad actors to do this. Yeah? Because now, instead of needing hundreds agents making calls, sending text messages, they have these AI scripts which we can do the same thing.
Dusty Rhodes 19:22
Do you think the responsibility for cybersecurity rests more with the provider or with the customer? I mean, is there anything technically that can be done on that side of things to cut down on cybersecurity?
Brendan Kearns 19:36
Well, the operator can make sure the calling party number is correct if that was followed through, I mean, you would see a call coming in from the Far East, maybe somewhere like the Philippines or Malaysia, or somewhere, or maybe, oh, I don't know anybody there that's probably spam.
Dusty Rhodes 19:53
Boom, not answering.
Brendan Kearns 19:57
Yeah, they can make the numbers look like Irish numbers now. I know, but still, I think the operator has the responsibility to make sure that the number the customer sees before he asks the call is correct. We can also do similar things with spam text messages in that we can use AI to determine whether a message is probably okay or not okay, you know, just about pure pattern recognition.
Dusty Rhodes 20:23
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's, that's, that's good. I hadn't thought of that, yeah.
Brendan Kearns 20:26
I mean, some people say that the operator needs to see into the message itself. You know?
Dusty Rhodes 20:30
That's a whole privacy issue. Yeah, you're delving into some dark waters there. And I know that there has been talk recently about European Governments wanting the ability to look at WhatsApp messages, and an issue they're saying is for, you know, kind of a child protection, but that can be expanded out to any I mean, that's that's a whole other debate. Listen. Let me go back to the book. It's called the Evolution of Telecommunications. As I say, you take it from dip, da, da, right up to cybersecurity and AI and everything today. What motivated you to write this book? Brendan?
Brendan Kearns 21:08
A number of years ago, I got this message. I was on the circulation list, and the message attachment was a PDF transcript of a talk given by the head of P & T in 1961 he gave his talk to the engineers in Dublin. And, okay, I went to this. And what amazed me was the language, the English in this it was also straightforward. All normal. I can understand what the guy was saying. Where is the jargon? Because engineers nowadays we're guilty of making things very complicated and making things not accessible for normal people. We use too much jargon, I think. And I thought to myself, My God, when they someday, when I'd like to write something simple and clear to explain, you know, what we do as engineers, because it's a bit of a barrier between us. And also, I've been a big fan of these popular science books from the 80s and 90s. Like The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. And actually, my favourite book, actually, is 1984 by George Orwell, you know, again, very simple SEER language.
Dusty Rhodes 22:23
Yeah, great book.
Brendan Kearns 21:23
I think we're done to see from here a year and a half ago, and then I had no excuse to do this, you know.
Dusty Rhodes 22:24
Do you think it's important? I find history and the way things came together, and the fact that history does repeat itself? So we were talking about, you know, kind of moving fast and breaking things with engineers from 200 years ago. It's still happening to this day. Do you think that sharing the knowledge and the experience you have is important for future generations of engineers?
Brendan Kearns 22:43
I do. I mean, in the past, there was no barrier to do work in engineering. For example, Morse himself was one of the best portrait painters in the world. He actually has, he has a painting in the Louvre in Paris. He was that good, and he was motivated when he heard his wife had died, yeah, and when she was buried before he even got the message, so he got home and found he said, There must be a faster way to exchange information. So, yeah, I hope that the book itself can inspire one or two people in this country to enter engineering and know that it's not completely about ones and zeros. I mean, the history of engineering is very interesting, and I tried to make it interesting in the book as well.
Dusty Rhodes 23:26
I think it's great because you're looking at stories from way back when, and you're looking at engineers and the challenges that they had were facing, and how they solved them, and, you know, the hoops they had to jump through in order to fix it. So seeing that and seeing how people think is amazing, but I think it's also a book about change. And I mean, you had people working for you when you were with Eircom and Telecom Éireann, and you're dealing with constant change. Is there anything you can share just from your own experience? And I'm talking about leadership now. Okay, what kind of leadership lessons did you learn when you were working with teams and going through these big technological shifts?
Brendan Kearns 24:01
I assembled a team to look at this new technology called IMS IP Multimedia subsidism. It was a voice over IP system for operators. I always like to work on small teams, no more than four or five people, where everybody is completely engaged and where no I would only start off a new project with some sort of a workshop. You see, how much do we know about this topic? How much do we not know about us? These workshops were like, all the ideas were put together at the beginning, and we then went on to look at the new technology, small teams, where everybody was honest with what they knew and didn't know. That's my way to do things I discovered.
Dusty Rhodes 24:52
And did you find that working with other engineers, then there was a certain curiosity, and how can we do this kind of feeling in the air?
Brendan Kearns 25:00
Of course, yeah, yeah. We engineers we're very inquisitive people. We say we do like to break things from time to time. That's necessary, you know, but then you have to fix them afterwards. Engineering is the art of giving something flesh, in my opinion.
Dusty Rhodes 25:16
Brendan, can I ask you about your work experience and working your way up the ladder. All right? About change? Because there's two things I want to do. I want to talk about change within a career and then transition to something completely different, because you have done both. Okay, what do you think is an effective way for an engineer to advance their career when you're in a huge organisation like Eircom?
Brendan Kearns 25:36
Yeah, the first thing you have to do is make a decision about what track do I want to take? Do I want to advance my career as an engineer, or do I want to go into management? For me, It was to be an engineer. I wanted to be the best engineer I could be. And I always had people available to work for me, but formally speaking, they were working for somebody else. I could do something myself. I would on my own, and if I were working on a slightly bigger project, I would also go there and get some people. So those two tracks are valid, one for pure management and the other for engineering. I would say that I know more about my own track than the other side.
Dusty Rhodes 26:20
Do you ever regret not going into management?
Brendan Kearns 26:20
No, I don't. Nowadays, management is far flatter than it used to be when I joined. First, I was in Telecom Éireann, the first time I was in a group, and then we had a manager there, and that group was part of a division. That division then was part of something else, a department. I think there were about 10 layers of management in Telecom Éireann at that time, and now there's only maybe four or five, because people have been given more responsibility. I think nowadays, more responsibility has fallen onto the pure engineering side.
Dusty Rhodes 26:55
And then can I ask you, then about transitioning to a new phase where you're getting out of large, nice, safe, paid salary or whatever, and you're transitioning into a new phase of your life. You said that you left the company 18 months ago, and now you're into a whole new phase of your life. And you've completely changed. You've gone from engineer to author. How did, how did that transition come about?
Brendan Kearns 27:17
I have always been interested in writing, you know, I was one of these people, I wanted to do something, but I never had the time to do it. So for me, the transition wasn't that hard. Actually, the problem for me was to establish a new routine. So when I was writing the book, I would come down to the office every morning as if I was going to work. That sort of helped me in the way that bit of compound interest, you know, you don't see one day another day, one day time goes by, and suddenly you have one chapter. You show the chapter to somebody, and they say, okay, not bad. Then you get courage, you know, you get the energy to move on to the next chapter, and so on, so forth. I mean, I brought the first draft of the four chapters to my Christmas party. Believe I did that, but I did. We already had some drinks, and I wrote it with a folder. I mean, I said, What do you think about this? Guys, when you're writing something this big, you have to be a little bit obsessed in today's world. I mean, today's world is for browsing and for skimming and for the internet.
Dusty Rhodes 28:16
It's seconds, seconds of attention. Yeah.
Brendan Kearns 28:23
It's very hard to get the focus to but I did a bit like a helping hand. I think you know that I was very, very honed in on one thing. And yeah, speak to my wife. She might say I disappeared for few months.
Dusty Rhodes 28:36
But you got the head down and you did listen. I think your personal story is a fascinating story, but the book and the way you've written it and literally gone through the history of telecommunications from the year dot right up to today, is just amazing. If you're interested in learning more Brendan's insights into the history and future of telecoms, you can find a link to his book. It's called the Evolution of Telecommunications. You can order it super easy on amazon.ie. And I put the link in the description area of this podcast, but for now. Brendan Kearns, thank you so much for joining us.
Brendan Kearns 29:04
Thank you, Dusty. It’s been a pleasure.
Dusty Rhodes 29:08
We hope you enjoyed our conversation today. If you know another engineer who would appreciate these insights, please do share this podcast with them. They can find us very simply by searching for Engineers Ireland, wherever they get their podcast. This episode is produced by dustpod.io for Engineers Ireland, for advanced episodes, more information on the latest trends in infrastructure or career development advice. You can find a wealth of resources on their website at engineers ireland.ie, until next time for myself. Dusty Rhodes, thank you for listening.