Noteworthy Women in Wireless Infrastructure – 2023

Colleen Murphy-Gomez

Vice President of Marketing
iBwave

“As a marketer I don’t always get to see installations up close and personal, but there was this one ah-ha moment early on in my career in this space that I will never forget.

At a previous company I oversaw a customer event at an MLB stadium where we had our DAS installed to help support coverage and capacity requirements in and around the stadium. Part of the event was a hosted tour with the head of technology for the stadium, and we visited their telecoms rooms where we got to see where the equipment combined in the headend. As we walked around, we were pointed out some of the different antennas. It was the first time I’d gotten to see our equipment installed and really made the connection to how these pieces of hardware worked together.

I understood in theory how and why proper coverage and capacity was needed but to see it firsthand and talk through the design process, deciding where all of the access points needed to be placed and why, was a game changer (pun intended). I remember saying to myself ‘oooh, this is why, when I was at that other stadium for a concert my phone said I had service bars but I couldn’t upload my pictures to Facebook.’ It clicked, I got it.

And as a marketer, staring at a picture of yet another white round box while making a brochure, it was finally sexy, finally real to me in a way it never had been before. I’ve taken that moment with me in my career and why now I try to point out antennas on poles or in the ceilings, I play around with propagation modeling in our software, and stop on the side of the road to check out big cable reels – it’s why when someone asks me what I do, I don’t just say I’m a marketer, I explain what I market and how it affects our daily lives beyond just the devices in our hands. Don’t even get me started on the day someone explained binary zeroes and ones to me!!”