Throughout her 18-year career, Doreen Trant has been at the heart of numerous companies and projects that have ultimately helped to mold the industry into what it is today, all while battling stereotypes that in the early years kept many women from pursuing a career in the wireless industry.
A chance meeting at a trade show got her started in wireless, and now she’s the vice president of sales and marketing for Berliner Communications Inc. In between, Trant held top management positions with Nortel Networks, Hughes Networks, Ericsson Inc. and Triton Network Systems.
“I started out in marketing doing some trade show with a graphics company in New York. I met some folks from Nortel, which at that time was Northern Telecom. They said there was an opening in the sales department,” Trant said.
Within six to nine months, she was promoted to a sales associate and became involved in the company’s transition from Northern Telecom to Nortel. Then in 1992, Trant said she was asked to participate in a “highly confidential” task team.
“They said we were going on special assignment, and I had always known special assignment to mean `uh-oh,”‘ she said. The confidential assignment called for Trant and about 60 others to create a joint venture with Motorola Inc. called Motorola Nortel.
For approximately eight months the team worked to build the new company, which Trant admits she thought would be an “industry giant,” but almost a year to the day after work began, the project came to an abrupt end and Trant found herself faced with option of staying with Nortel or moving on.
She said both Nortel and Motorola made her an offer, but there was so much bad blood between the companies, she opted to take a position with Hughes.
After a year-and-a-half with Hughes, Trant left to join Ericsson in 1995. She eventually was promoted to vice president of sales for the U.S., and became part of an international management team comprised mostly of Swedish men. Being the minority however, nothing new for Trant.
Particularly in the beginning, Trant said she struggled to be noticed and taken seriously.
“It was rough, it was very, very rough. You wouldn’t believe the comments I would get from guys,” said Trant. “The customer would never make eye contact with me … immediately they would go to the men.”
A thick skin and a lot of experience paid off, and Trant flourished at Ericsson, but after several years Triton Networks, which supplies fixed-wireless infrastructure equipment, began to court Trant. For six months they wooed her until she finally agreed to make the switch. At the time, Triton was just getting started in an industry that held tremendous promise. Attractive stock options helped to influence Trant’s decision, but about a year after her start there, the stock market took a devastating turn and the entire fixed-wireless industry hit bottom.
“I’m not sorry I made the move to go to Triton. I really learned a lot over there, but all of our customers were struggling.”
Now at Berliner Communications, Trant is still facing new challenges. Berliner Communications provides radio-frequency engineering, site acquisition, infrastructure installation and project management services for carriers and tower companies. Trant said much of her career was spent on the infrastructure side of the house, so focusing on services is a nice switch.
“We’re not selling infrastructure anymore; we’re selling people,” she said.
Looking back, Trant is astonished by wireless’ growth. She said she remembers when carriers were buying spectrum for $200,000.
“No one really believed that this industry would take off. I would have never dreamed that it would take off like it has today,” said Trant.
