Fred R. Goldstein is the Principal of Ionary Consulting.  He advises companies on technical, regulatory and business issues related to the telecommunications and Internet industries, especially in areas where they overlap.

Some relevant examples of his experience include:

• He has helped a number of Competitive Local Exchange Carriers (CLECs) respond to a changing regulatory climate, helping plan their migration from the Unbundled Network Element Platform (UNE-P) to switch-based operation (UNE-Loop or wireless local loop), often broadening their service profile in the process
• He has provided expert testimony before several state regulatory agencies, courts, and the Federal Communications Commission, on behalf of Competitive Local Exchange Carriers and other competitive service providers, primarily focusing on the technical and economic impact of interconnection agreements and intercarrier compensation. He has provided direct support to law firms on matters concerning telecommunications, particularly in areas that involve the overlap of regulatory, legal and technical issues.
• He has assisted CLECs with business modeling, intercarrier negotiation, and with the use of unbundled network elements to provide both basic and advanced services. He has created geographic (GIS) and spreadsheet models to provide CLECs with alternative scenarios for Digital Subscriber Loop deployment, which quantify the potential subscribers reachable by different loop technologies in their selected market areas.
• He has worked with Internet Service Providers on a range of issues, primarily dealing with access networks.  He has performed  cost modeling for potential Hybrid Fiber-Coax overbuilds of Cable TV networks, enabling ISPs to evolve into "triple play" ISP-cable-telephone providers in suitable markets.
  
• He has performed due diligence on behalf of potential investors in companies making network hardware, software and test equipment, focusing on techical issues and the applicability of the target company's products for emerging markets.
  
• For a large cable MSO with a large and rapidly-growing PacketCable telephone service, he designed a technical strategy for taking over its PSTN interconnection from a third party, preparing a detailed forecast of required interconnection facilities, including relevant capital and operational expenses, based on applying PSTN traffic engineering methodologies in context of several interconnection agreements.
• For a large radio and television broadcasting company, he analyzed their program transmission, data and voice networks, to help them determine the most appropriate protocols and architecture for building a new integrated backbone network.
• For a major service provider, he analyzed options for entering the wireless business, analyzing potentially available frequencies, using Geographic Information Systems tools to profile the reachable population for licenses which the company was considering acquiring, and identifying potential products and technologies that could be used to provide advanced wireless services.
• For an overseas manufacturer of telecommunications equipment seeking to create a presence in the North American public network access equipment market, he led a case identifying several potential new niche products that were in a specific target market size range.
• For the United States Department of Energy, he co-authored the report Energy Consumption by Office and Telecommunications Equipment in Commercial Buildings, Volume I: Energy Consumption Baseline. This identified total nationwide power consumption by enterprise network and computer equipment, as well as wireline, wireless and Internet service providers.
• For a major IT company bidding on a large government network contract, he performed competitive analysis, developing network architecture and cost models for its own products and for its competition. These covered a range of common carrier services, LANs, MANs, and backbone ATM and IP routing equipment.
• For a worldwide provider of electronic travel reservation services, he analyzed its network requirements both from a business and technology perspective. He helped develop a business strategy to assist with its bandwidth and common carrier services acquisition during a time of rapid carrier consolidation, and developed a global network architecture to facilitate widespread network migration to TCP/IP.
• For an information services network provider that had recently merged with a privately-held Internet Service Provider, he assisted in performing a third-party valuation of the ISP’s business. Due to the highly inflated share price of Internet stocks at the time, this included both an enterprise value, based on likely future cash flow and profitability, and a comparative-worth analysis, based on share prices of similar companies at that time.
• For a major CATV operator considering its options for becoming a Competitive Local Exchange Carrier, he performed market analysis, provided a graphical overview of potential subscribers within its planned service area using GIS tools and related databases, and provided market-entry pricing strategy focusing on areas where the incumbent carrier had its highest profit margins.
• For a provider of satellite services, he analyzed the competitive marketplace for satellite, terrestrial wireless and wireline data communications systems, helping them identify and quantify the most promising market opportunities for their planned satellite-based digital communications services.
• For a major on-line service company’s access provider spending several hundred million dollars per year on telecommunications services, he developed teletraffic analysis and forecasting techniques and tools, helping them optimize a nationwide modem access network whose sustained growth during that period exceeded five percent per month.
• For a major bank, he participated in the redesign of the corporate backbone network architecture following its merger with another bank of nearly equal size. This involved the creation of a new network architecture based on an IP core network, supporting a hierarchy of regional and local networks. The new design accommodated the individual requirements of the various business units within the bank while providing the economy of scale of a single company-wide network.
• He developed a technical strategy for the Computer Integrated Telephony business for a major computer company, leveraging the company’s core competency in LANs and Application Programming Interfaces to provide a set of tools that could be applied to vertical and horizontal markets.
• He represented a company at the ANSI-accredited technical subcommittee that initially developed Frame Relay, ATM and ISDN standards, where he developed congestion control and avoidance standards for Frame Relay and ATM networks, and participated in the development of various protocols which became standards.

Prior to starting Ionary Consulting, employers included Arthur D. Little Inc. and one of its successors, TIAX LLC, and the Network Consulting Practice at BBN Technologies, a unit of GTE Internetworking. He was previously employed by Digital Equipment Corporation as an in-house telecommunications consultant, and as a strategic planner and product manager in its Networks and Communications business.

He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Skidmore College. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE. He holds three patents in the area of Asynchronous Transfer Mode technology, including two for methods of congestion control and avoidance, and one for a LAN-oriented ATM switching system. He has been a member of the faculty of the State-of-the-Art Program at Northeastern University, and has taught courses on ISDN, Frame Relay, ATM, telecommunications transmission, and OSI and TCP/IP protocols. He has also taught several satellite courses on ATM, Frame Relay and ISDN for National Technological University.

Selected publications include:

• The Great Telecom Meltdown, book published by Artech House, 2005. 
• The Telecom Blame Game, guest column in CNET News.com Perspectives series, October 2002.
• Enterprise Network Strategy After the Bubble (co-author), article in Business Communications Review, February 2002.
• Cable Should Take a Fresh Look at Access (co-author), article inMultichannel News, Oct. 18, 1999.
• ISDN In Perspective, book published by Addison-Wesley, 1992.
• Narrowband Frame Relay Congestion Control, presented to 1991 IEEE International Phoenix Conference on Computers and Communications.
• Trends in Communications Management, editor and principal writer, 1980-1987. Newsletter published by Telemation Management Group, New York.