About

Someone who has lived your
experience, not a consulting firm.

I started in dial-up helpdesk in 1999 and never really left infrastructure. Service provider engineering, solutions architecture, founder, private equity backed platforms and now a practice that works with all of the above.

Bits in Flight is my practice and it is the entity I primarily work through. I also work with Gabriel Advisors on telecom and digital infrastructure engagements as a Managing Director.

Jason Gintert
Approach

Start with
the whole.

I wrote a piece a while back about David Bohm, a physicist who argued that reality is not a collection of separate parts that happen to interact. It is whole, and the separate things we perceive are temporary unfoldings of a deeper order.

That is also a fair description of a network.

Your BGP policy shapes traffic patterns. Those patterns drive QoS decisions. Those decisions set application performance. That performance is what your users actually experience, and that experience is what the business reports upward. One continuous thread, not five concerns owned by five teams and five vendors.

Most advisory work in this industry is organized around the diagram. Someone sells you connectivity, someone else sells you security, someone else sells you the thing with AI in it. Every one of them is looking at a fragment and quoting you a price for it.

I start with the whole and work inward. What is actually there, what it costs you, what it is doing to the rest of the system, and what would happen if you changed it.

Bring me the whole picture. Campus, WAN, data center, connectivity, cloud, whatever AI workload landed on you this year. I will tell you what is working, what is costing you money for no return, and what the next move is.

The short version

What I actually
bring.

01

Vendor depth

Direct experience with network hardware and software vendors, waves, IP transit, dark fiber and cross-connects.

02

An entrepreneur’s instincts

I am a founder. I have sat on both sides of the P & L, signed the carrier contracts, signed POs, hired the engineers and explained the budget.

03

Connections that open doors

Relationships across vendors, carriers, content networks, exchange operators and peer operators.

The longer version

How I got
here.

I have spent a long time building and operating internet infrastructure. It started in the early days of the internet, moved through service provider engineering and solutions architecture and in 2016 I co-founded WAN Dynamics to serve the emerging software-defined WAN market.

Along the way I volunteered at Ohio IX, helping bring neutral peering throughout and creating local routes for Ohio networks. I served as its second CTO and I sit on the board today.

I am also President of the US Networking User Association, a national vendor-neutral practitioner community I grew out of the Ohio Network User Group. It puts me in regular conversation with operators, engineers, executives and boards across the country. It is also where my view of this work comes from. Communities and infrastructure are not separate problems. They are the same interconnected problem at different scales.

Roles

Now and
previously.

Now

Previously

  • Co-Founder & CTO, WAN Dynamics
  • Chief Solutions Officer, Nitel
  • CTO, Laketec
  • CTO, Ohio IX
  • Service provider engineering and solutions architecture

Around the industry

  • Network Automation Forum and Autocon
  • Writing for Futurum’s Tech Field Day and Pipeline Magazine
  • Regular speaker and community organizer

Based in Cleveland, Ohio but on site when the work calls for it.

Three ways to work together, and how the money works on each, are on the Work With Me page.

Work With Me →