Dr Frederick J.W. Symons (DIC Electrical and Electronic Engineering 1963)

Provided by Peter Gerrand

Fred Symons was born on 19 January 1937 in Adelaide, and died in St Vincent’s Hospital, Melbourne on 15 March 2007 after suffering a massive stroke. The month before, Fred’s family and friends had joined in celebrating Fred’s 70th birthday at the Brunswick Croquet Club in Melbourne, where Fred was in good form.

Fred’s 40-year career in telecommunications began when he won an engineering cadetship from the Postmaster General’s Department to study electrical engineering at Adelaide University, from 1956 to 1959.

As a first year undergraduate, he met Mary Hosking, a physiotherapy student, in 1956 through the Student Christian Movement. They married in the middle of his final year, in 1959; Mary had already graduated. Marriage was obviously very good for Fred, as he graduated with1st class honours.

Fred worked for just one year, 1960, with the PMG in South Australia, and in January 1961 he sailed to England with Mary, having won a Fellowship to gain a year’s industry experience with GEC at Coventry. He then won a further scholarship to spend two years at Imperial College London; during this time their first child Michael was born.  At the Imperial College Fred studied advanced telecommunications technology towards a Graduate Diploma.

In early 1964 he returned to the PMG, not to Adelaide but to Melbourne, to work in the PMG Research Laboratories as the Divisional Engineer, Probability - a title which reflected his expertise in mathematics and statistics.

In 1966 Fred was recruited to work in Harry Wragge’s new Switching & Signalling Subsection as Divisional Engineer, Software on the IST (Integrated Switching and Transmission) Project. This was a very ambitious project, aimed at designing one of the world’s first computer-controlled telephone exchanges, using digital technology. There were no textbooks available to help the designers.

Fred was in charge of designing and implementing the software, and the Hungarian-born engineer Andy Domjan, who became Fred’s closest friend outside his family, was in charge of designing and building the hardware. The software languages available at that time were extremely primitive – barely above machine code in their intelligibility. But Fred and Mel Ward, who worked for him on this project, produced an impressive set of functional design specifications for the software programmers, to ensure that this computer-controlled switch would interwork properly with the surrounding telephone network. This was ground-breaking R&D – the IST project was in competition with similar projects at Bell Labs in the US and the top telecommunications labs in Japan, Italy, France, Canada, Germany and the UK. The Australian team was the first in the world to produce a computer-controlled digital switch that successfully handled live telephone traffic.

The project became a valuable training ground for many of the next generation of telecommunications engineering managers, some of whom rose to very senior positions in Australia and overseas. And it enabled those who stayed in the laboratories, later called TRL, to apply their first-hand expertise to evaluate the technology products being offered from overseas vendors.

In early 1972 Fred was promoted to head a new section called Network Studies. Fred had some innovative management ideas, designed to challenge and bring out the best in people, such as setting up task forces headed by the most junior member to which he, as the most senior member, would willingly contribute. He continued to encourage and act as a mentor for many junior and not-so-junior staff, in all of his years at the Labs.

In 1974 Fred won an even better scholarship: a Commonwealth Public Service overseas scholarship, enabling him to work towards a PhD at the University of Essex from 1975-77, with a generous financial arrangement that enabled him to take with him Mary and their five children, Michael, David, Kate, Peter and John.  They rented an old farmhouse – centuries old – in the countryside, about 30 minutes drive from the University. 

Fred’s formal supervisor at Essex was an entrepreneurial academic called Mike Hills. Dr Hills made a habit of recruiting talented mature-age postgraduate students from overseas telecommunication companies to enrich his group’s expertise; in fact Fred’s predecessor as overseas postgraduate student had been Sadahiko Kano from NTT Labs Japan, who went on to become Chief Planner for NTT, the world’s largest telecommunications company.

Mike leant on Fred to do a bit of lecturing for him, setting up a new course on telecommunications networks. Fred cheerfully agreed, but it added significantly to his work load, and Mary has memories of him telephoning from the University often to say he would have to work late – usually until after midnight.

Fred was never short of innovative ideas, and what he decided to do for his PhD was to invent a new technique to find and correct the errors in network signalling protocols. He came up with a new diagrammatic technique that he called Numerical Petri Nets, and as well as developing the theory, he implemented a software prototype that he brought back to the Telecom Research Labs (TRL), when he and Mary and the kids returned to Melbourne in 1978.

It wasn’t until a year or so after that, when he became head of Switching & Signalling Branch at TRL in 1979, that he felt that in good conscience he could assemble a small team to take his ideas further. This team, led by Jonathan Billington and helped by the local software house Unico, developed PROTEAN, a powerful protocol debugger based on Fred’s Numerical Petri Nets. The Branch used PROTEAN to find and correct errors in the engineering specification being developed in Geneva for a new signalling system, No. 7 signalling, which was to become the most powerful signalling system in the world’s telecommunications networks for the next 20 years. Fred’s research was always idealistic and ambitious, but it was also always oriented to achieving practical results with considerable social benefits.

From 1979 to 1985 he was Head of Switching & Signalling Branch – a team of about 100 research engineers, scientists, technical officers and administrative staff. He was a good captain-coach to the team, despite being very busy in interfacing with the Branch’s clients and with senior management.  He also tried hard to find opportunities for Australian industry to collaborate in many of its projects.

In the following four years, 1985 to 1989, Fred was Assistant Director, Strategy at the laboratories, and was also an external member of OTC’s R&D Board, and Deputy Chairman of the Radio Research Body, at that time the only Australian body offering funds to universities for telecommunications-oriented research work.

In1989 Fred became foundation Professor of Telecommunications at Monash University, a position he held until he retired in 1996.
Dr Bruce Tonkin, who worked very closely with Fred at Monash, has written:

“Fred joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Systems Engineering when it had a very conservative approach to the teaching of engineering, with a focus on the fundamentals of physics and mathematics. Answers to exam questions often consisted of one correct mathematical answer. Fred immediately took a different approach, using his practical experience from the telecommunications world. He set problems for students where the variables were not all known, and where there was no single correct answer. He encouraged students to be much more open minded in their thinking about possible solutions to problems.

“Fred then took these ideas further to consider that not all students naturally respond well to the traditional analytical/theoretical method of teaching engineering, and that many students learn though experience by applying concepts to concrete problems. He worked with local industry including Telecom to establish laboratories of telecommunications equipment so that students could see how it works.

“His remaining years at Monash were dedicated to introducing new methods of teaching to cover the learning preferences of a broad range of students.

“Fred was known both for his innovative approach to all areas of his work, as well as his underlying sense of fun in everything he did.   In fact some students thought he was Woody Allen.  He was well liked by both staff and students for his positive can-do attitude, and also his willingness to assist all students regardless of their academic abilities.”

Fred was dogged by bad health in his years at Monash, but despite that Mary can remember him regularly working at the University preparing lectures to well after midnight, getting home often at 2 or 3 in the morning, after a day full of lectures and meetings – just as he tended to do during his three years at Essex.

Fred was very fortunate in his marriage to Mary, his closest friend and strongest supporter; with their five splendid offspring and their partners; and with their nine grandchildren.

Countless others have also benefited from Fred’s friendship, his generosity with his time, and the encouragement he extended during his very energetic career – and in retirement.  Fred was a wonderful human being, whom many of us are grateful to have had as a friend.