Brief Summary

I have over 30 years’ experience in the IT industry, most of which has been spent in networking/telecoms in the UK/EMEA and NZ/APAC.  I have worked in varied roles such as technical consulting, network design and architecture, pre-sales support, operational support and software engineering.  I moved to New Zealand in 2008, where I worked in several roles before returning to the UK in 2022.

My experience has been gained in a wide range of organisations, from start-ups, through enterprises and to large service providers and telcos.  I have worked in both team environments and on an individual and independent basis.  In recent years, I have also done a lot of my work in the public sector.

Though performing hands-on work is not as regular as it used to be, it has been a strong element in my previous work, when I gained satisfaction from performing proof-of-concepts before deploying to production environments.  I first started working with Cisco in 1994, and with Juniper in 1999.

I very much enjoy customer-facing roles since no two customers are alike, and so the variety this gives is always a challenge that I am keen to take on.  Taking part in technical discussions with customers forms a key part of being able to fully understand their requirements, which is essential to being able to deliver a successful solution.

Latest News and Useful Articles                — Updated: 30 March 2025 —

• The Signal chat leak and the NSA.  [Schneier]

• Intel and Microsoft staff lured to work for fake Chinese company.  [The Register]

• Passive BGP sessions.  [ipSpace]

• Any-to-any connectivity on the Internet.  [ipSpace]

• PMTUD - Path MTU Discovery.  [Weberblog]

• Report on Paragon spyware.  [Schneier]  [CitizenLab]

• FCC tracking down blocked Chinese vendors.  [The Register]

• More countries are demanding encryption backdoors.  [Schneier]

• IPv6 basics - routing.  [ForwardingPlane]

• IPv6 and the revenge of the stupid bridges.  [ipSpace]

• NCSC post-quantum cyrptography timelines.  [Schneier]  [NCSC]

• Routed interfaces on Layer 3 switches and internal VLANs.  [ipSpace]

• IP vs CLNP: network state summarisation.  [ipSpace]

• Improvements in brute force attacks.  [Schneier]

A more comprehensive news/article list can be found on my networks sub-domain here.

Click here for the latest full version of my CV, or find me on LinkedIn and X (Twitter).

rob (at) larsenconsulting (dot) net

© Robert Larsen.  All rights reserved.