First, I would like to thank everyone for the support they have shown me as well as the great relationships I have made as a board and committee member with WISPA. I am sure I can continue to serve the WISP community with WISPA, and I do look forward to doing so! There are some questions that were posted to the candidates, and with the election looming, I wanted to make sure I addressed those!
Since some of you do not know me, I wished to give you some background. */Dennis Burgess Bio/* Dennis Burgess has been in the service provider business since 1992 when he started his first BBS. This system grew to one of the larger BBS systems in the St. Louis area. After testing out of several classes in college he graduated from Vatterott Technical College in 1997, 5 months early. He obtained a Associates in Computer Electronics and another in Networking Technologies from Vatterott. Mr. Burgess was hired before graduation by a local IT Consulting company. During the next few years Dennis worked for large construction firms, law offices, and other manufacturing businesses in and around Missouri and Illinois under several Consulting firms. Typically he worked as a Network Administrator, Network Engineer and/or Project Engineer. Typical projects were rolling out large shared server systems, clustered mail and terminal servers, as well a complete network router/engineering support for many clients. Dennis also worked for a group of Harley-Davidson Dealerships that had very minimal networking between their locations to a full business-grade network including centralized management, support services and programmers on-staff as the Director of Information Technologies. Mr. Burgess then started his own Wireless ISP service in the Festus and Hillsboro, MO area, that serviced the under serviced areas with high-speed internet access. This Wireless ISP was sold and later merged with other businesses. While running his WISP, Dennis also created a new company, Link Technologies, Inc. Link Technologies, Inc serves hundreds of Wireless and Non-Wireless Internet Service Providers around the USA, Canada, South America, Austria la, Europe and even Africa. Link Technologies, Inc is a full service Mikrotik and routing support company that focuses on Mikrotik RouterOS as well as any other internet routing systems that their customers have a need for. LTI also has deployed and worked with companies such as CenturyTel, The US Navy, The Department of Homeland Security, and other large Internet providers around the USA. Most of the work focuses on network design, network engineering, project management, network deployment and RF Engineering. These include RF Path Analysis, Site Surveys and major network build-outs. *What do you see as the top 3 priority items that need to be addressed by WISPA? * First and foremost, we need to ensure a high quality organization. To do this, we will need a dedicated person to the WISPA organization handing calls, ,managing memberships, as well as actively recruiting new members! This is the future of WISPA, as it has been with many other organizations! This will give WISPA the direction that it needs to go into the future by better maintaining WISPAs relationship with its most important asset, its members! Increasing membership is another goal! To hire dedicated personnel, move froward with FCC and other hot topics that WISPs need to have a hand in costs! Raising dues could be used to create more income, however, being able to represent the majority of WISPs in the US would be a much better goal. Not only would we have increased revenue from increased membership, but also the increased membership would be a significant resource for both existing and future members as well. It would be nice to be able to say that WISPA represents 90+% of the known WISPS in the USA! Increasing that membership is good, but what will get those members to join! Value! We already have a very low cost of joining, however, that alone is not enough. We need to have resources! These resources are part of what the WISPA.ORG website as well as the new WIKI site is all about. Members will have access to more resources in the future and by us developing those resources, we will ensure that new members get the value they need out of WISPA to join! *What the the greatest hurdles faced by the WISPA industry in the short term? In the long Term? *Growing pains! The next board will place many new seeds with the way WISPA operates. WISPA operates as a completely volunteer organization right now, and in the future it will be able to better attend to its members by having the dedicated staff that the organization needs. This growth shows the change from a cowboy attitude to a more professional organization with dedicated staff and member resources. *There has been a great deal of debate about the dues structure -- what do you think should be done to provide resources to the Association for critical short term needs and to fund the growth? *I think the dues and costs are low, however we do need to increase membership to increase the revenue. Not only will we have more revenue for the things that WISPA members need and want, but we will also have a larger membership to be able to do this with! *What is your position on the need for an Executive Director -- do we need a secretary type of person, a true "executive" that is well regarded by his/her peers, or something in between?* I think a good starting point is a secretary type person, this may be what we need to increase the membership to be able to support an "executive" person. Something in-between, that knows the industry as well as maybe a WISP themselves would also help the argument. *How does your background and experience make you a strong and viable candidate for the Board that will enable the Association to go to the next level? * I have been in the WISP market since 2001, and consulting for a good part of that. Most of the customers I deal with are Wireless ISPs so I have a unique view of the wireless market in general. I also will aways voice my opinion, regardless if it is a popular opinion or not. * * * * * ----------------------------------------------------------- Dennis Burgess, CCNA, A+, Mikrotik Certified Trainer WISPA Board Member - wispa.org <http://www.wispa.org/> Link Technologies, Inc -- Mikrotik & WISP Support Services WISPA Vendor Member* *Office*: 314-735-0270 *Website*: http://www.linktechs.net <http://www.linktechs.net/> */ LIVE On-Line Mikrotik Training <http://www.onlinemikrotiktraining.com>/* The information transmitted (including attachments) is covered by the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, 18 U.S.C. 2510-2521, is intended only for the person(s) or entity/entities to which it is addressed and may contain confidential and/or privileged material. Any review, retransmission, dissemination or other use of, or taking of any action in reliance upon, this information by persons or entities other than the intended recipient(s) is prohibited, If you received this in error, please contact the sender and delete the material from any computer. Rick Harnish wrote: > > The election ballots are set to go out Tuesday as per the schedule. > Ron Harden has asked 6 very good questions of the candidates. They > can be found on the WISPA Home page under Ask The Candidates. Please > submit your answers ASAP if you want your responses viewable by our > membership. Thus far there have been only three responses. If you > can't figure out how to post your comments, please send them to me and > I will post them for you. > > > > Thanks, > > Rick > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > _______________________________________________ > > WISPA Membership Mailing List > > ----------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
