Twenty years running ISP and data center infrastructure in Northern Illinois. Co-founding an internet exchange. Watching public narratives about technical systems drift further from operational reality.
Most of what gets written about this stuff is wrong in ways that matter. Not maliciously wrong. Just written by people who’ve never had to make the system work. This site is the correction.
Background
I’m CTO at DNA Communications, a CLEC based in Rochelle, Illinois. I co-founded FD-IX in 2014 to bring IX infrastructure to markets that don’t have it. Before DNA, I built Intelligent Computing Solutions from scratch as a WISP serving DeKalb County, starting in 2004.
I run most of the content for The Brothers WISP, the longest-running podcast in the WISP industry.
WISPA recognized me with the President’s Award of Excellence in 2021 and the Knights of the Black Tie in 2013. I’ve spoken at WISPAPALOOZA and DataCenter Chicago on peering, open IX models, and industry forecasting.
What you’ll find here
Data centers, telecommunications, energy markets, broadband policy, public finance. Same method across all of it: identify the narrative, check it against the data, publish the gap.
Standards
Every claim gets checked against public records, not against what advocacy groups on either side say those records show. Government filings, utility tariffs, court dockets, and assessor data come first. Trade group and single-issue advocacy sources get used as leads, not citations, and when one appears in an article it’s labeled by its position. If five outlets ran the same paragraph, that’s one wire story, not five confirmations.
Data doesn’t transfer between markets. A water figure from an arid Southwest site says nothing about a Great Lakes site until someone checks the Great Lakes site. Every piece gets calibrated to the market it’s actually about: the right utility territory, the right state’s tax code, the right grid operator. Most of what’s published so far has meant ComEd territory, Illinois property tax law, and PJM capacity zones, because that’s where the reporting has been. Where a claim depends on conditions elsewhere, that’s stated, and it doesn’t get imported as if it applies here.
Before anything publishes, I run four passes on my own argument:
- The strongest version of my position.
- The weakest link in it.
- The strongest version of the opposing case.
- The weakest version of the opposing case.
The third is the gate. If the strongest case against me holds, the conclusion changes or the piece doesn’t run.
The fourth is there to be recognized and left alone. Refuting the weakest objection proves nothing, and spending space on it is a way of avoiding the real one.
An error can be systemic, regional, or isolated. The defect can be exaggeration, selective framing, misattributed cause, or fabrication. If credible evidence supports more than one interpretation, I call the claim contested rather than false.
Collapsing all of that into “misinformation” is itself a way of getting it wrong.
Corrections
Errors get corrected in place, not scrubbed quietly. When a fact in a published piece turns out wrong, the article text is corrected and a dated note is added at the bottom stating what changed and why. If you find an error, use the contact link below.
Disclosures
My day job is a small ISP serving small business clients, a different product than what hyperscale data centers buy. That’s the same distinction as a tire shop having no meaningful stake in automotive design. My side job is a small internet exchange in tier-2 markets connecting other small ISPs to streaming media, also materially different from hyperscale data-center interconnection.
I could run ads or take sponsors. I won’t. This site is self-funded. No advertiser relationships, no sponsorships, no paid placements have run here, and none will.
Contact
For corrections, press, or industry inquiries: LinkedIn.