Hired in October 1999 to do utility SCADA. The water and wastewater treatment work for JEA was the reason for the hire, and it began with the tenure itself — which places the operational technology thread at the start of the consulting career rather than somewhere in the middle of it. Everything else here was built on top of that starting point, not before it.
The title says network engineer; the work ran from climbing the tower and terminating the feed line through to systems architecture, and the breadth is the point rather than an aside.
Designed WAN, LAN, internet and security architectures for large corporations and local, state and federal facilities. Hospital networks across New York, Florida and North Carolina under HIPAA. Plant-floor wireless for industrial manufacturers. Utility SCADA across a municipal electric and water estate. Intercontinental telemetry for power generation. Department of Defense and special operations work under Top Secret clearance. Greenfield residential cable plant. Resort property management integration in the Bahamas.
CCIE #10042 earned during this tenure, on August 4, 2002.
The JEA relationship did not end when the tenure did. It ran for twenty-five years, across this employer and the next one.
Projects in this period
- Reliability Engineering PracticeA reliability toolchain bought for one utility engagement in 2000, carried into a city estate, and still running twenty-three years later — availability as a computed number rather than a drawn assertion.
- Cisco DOCSIS Residential Cable BuildoutsGreenfield residential cable plant, headend policy, address management and voice — and one public address pool carrying thousands of residents.
- Super Bowl XXXIX Surveillance Network and Command CenterThe transport and command center behind the video surveillance estate for the 2005 Super Bowl — evaluated, architected and overseen by the same person, deliberately.
- Super Bowl XXXIX Stadium WirelessTicketing and access control across seven stadium gates for the 2005 Super Bowl, backhauled over six point-to-point bridge pairs, in the most hostile radio environment there is.
- Fort Stewart Mobile Disaster Recovery FleetA fleet of vehicles able to deploy across Georgia during disasters and operate where fixed infrastructure was gone.
- JSOC Content Distribution CapabilityCisco Content Engines placing data locally at each site to cut lag between the United States and locations outside it.
- SOCOM Transportable Wireless KitA two-site voice, video and data package over a point-to-point link where no fixed infrastructure existed.
- GE International Power Generation Monitoring NetworkReal-time plant telemetry from generating facilities in China and Australia back to a monitoring center in Florida.
- Georgia-Pacific IT/OT ConvergenceProcess control and SCADA alongside HVAC, access control and video on the enterprise network — before the industry had words for it.
- Duval County Substation NetworkEvery electrical substation in the county connected for centralized management and monitoring.
- Nissan and Georgia-Pacific Industrial WirelessPlant-floor, material handling, yard and warehouse coverage surveyed on site with the lines running.
- JEA Power Quality Metering NetworkVoltage sags, swells and harmonics measured at ten substations — one template design, an addressing plan built for it, and fiber off the ground grid, before the data was aggregated into the PIE SCADA platform.
- Kerzner International Resort PMS IntegrationGuest internet and marina shore power authenticated, metered and posted to a room account across resort properties.
- Hospital Network and Clinical WirelessFacility-wide clinical wireless under HIPAA across hospital systems in New York, Florida, Delaware and North Carolina.
- JEA Utility SCADA and Redundant Control SitesSCADA across 24 treatment plant sites on a SONET and ATM core — water and wastewater engineered as separate systems, with the control network separated from the corporate one two decades before the industry had a name for it.
- Statewide Florida Wireless InstallationsTower, antenna and LMR feed line work across the state, alongside the RF design.
- Rosen Hotels BBSM Custom DevelopmentGuest transaction, port hopping and cross-property rates built in the Cisco BBSM SDK — and closed by telling the customer to wait for the next release.
- Florida Rock Facilities Technology AssessmentEstate-wide survey establishing what could be connected, what it would cost, and what had to be built first.
- Florida National Guard Continuity of Operations PlanThe first COOP of the career — the discipline carried forward into the City of Jacksonville plan a decade later.
- Insurance Carrier E-Commerce PlatformMainframe to public web in 2001, across a colocation tunnel and two firewalls — where the deliverable was the boundary, not the website, and the documentation reached revision 243.
- Nassau County Sheriff's Office Countywide WirelessMulti-tower public safety wireless across a large rural county, surveyed by driving it and plotting the readings by hand.
- E-Commerce Site ArchitecturePIX firewalls, content switches and SSL accelerators for early commercial web estates.
- Emergency Operations Center Wireless NetworkA fault-tolerant Motorola wireless network built specifically for EOC use during natural disasters.
- JEA Change Management SystemA web-based change management process and system designed from first principles, later carried to the City as the enterprise standard.
- Vystar Credit Union Windows 2000 DomainA complete Windows 2000 domain design for a regional credit union.
- Water Treatment Facilities WAN/LANWAN and LAN design for water treatment facilities, with PIX firewall and web monitoring.
- National Insurance Carrier Enterprise WANFive sites joined over an AT&T frame relay cloud at committed rates from 32K to 320K — an era when the design had to decide what mattered, because not everything could.
Also worked in this period
The same engagements, filed under the other era they ran through.
- City Council Chamber AV and IT ArchitectureAudio, video, voting and broadcast systems for a chamber where proceedings are a public record — owned for twenty-one years.
- First Coast Radio SystemRegional shared public safety radio across three system generations — original, retrofit, and full P25 replacement.
- The Utility Relationship: Twenty-Five Years, Two EmployersSubject-matter expert to the same municipal utility from October 1999 to January 2024 — first as its consultant, then as the City's counterpart to it, because JEA is an authority under the city charter.
- Enterprise Change Management StandardA change process designed for a utility in 1999, carried into the City as its enterprise standard, and handed to operations in 2012 — after which it outlasted both commercial platforms bought to run it.