Klaus Gueldenpfennig grew up in West Berlin, Germany. After studying telecommunications and electrical engineering, he began working for DeTeWe (Deutsche Telephonwerke) in 1954, later taking employment with Telefunken.
In this interview, Gueldenpfennig provides a comparative analysis of telecommunications industries in Europe, Asia, and the United States. He pays particular attention to government regulation, taxing, specifications, and market demands. In recounting his own education and career, Gueldenpfennig assesses the state of communications education at a time when switching was seldom included in formal academic training.
Talking about telecommunications in any of the colleges until very recently, until the last few years, that meant radio communications. That meant television, that meant satellite traffic, that meant single item [?] switching, Telecom switching-- that wasn't part of the agenda. So there they used to be the so-called... call them "brain drains" or whatever, you know, shiploads full of people who got picked up over in Europe and moved over here. Into Kellogg, into GTE, into AT&T, into Stromberg, for that matter.
But there wasn't any decent equipment in the market. When we had our own switching systems designed, we were looking in the market to find one to buy, so we could test our equipment. Well, we couldn't find one to buy. And in my travels I met a lot of people who said, "Well, when you find one, let me know. I'm looking for them, too." So we got back home, and said, "I guess we have to do our own." So we sat down and made our own. We let some others know, "Well, this is what we're doing." Oh, one of the Northern guys came in and wanted to take it right away. "Wait a minute., wait a minute. This is my lab model. You can't have this!" "Wow, I want eight or nine of them!" "Well, okay." So we struggled to put something together, and it became a very good business relationship.
Still an important product. It comes in spurts. That's the funny thing, you know. it's not a product which you continuously sell so many a week, or so many a month. It comes all of a sudden that you sell fifty or sixty of them. It is quiet for a while and then all of a sudden, somebody needs five or ten. And so on. They run anywhere, from a sales point of view, depending on the configuration, on equipment, from $25,000 to $50,000 apiece. And nobody ever plans ahead. That's the other problem, you know. When they need them, they need them now. Since you don't know what they need, it is very difficult to guess how to build them. Which ones to build? Which pieces to have ready and which not? So you have your marketing guess-game, but that's true with pretty much all areas. We pioneered what we refer to now as "dumb switches." I don't consider them dumb; I consider them highly intelligent. But these are switching systems which are fully programmable by the customer. In other words, it doesn't have a call-processing type function in it. It has, instead, an operating system much like a PC. You can tell it to do anything and everything you want it to do.