I moved to the Houston area in my mid-twenties, enrolled at North Harris Community College near Spring, Texas, and dove into an Electronics Technology program that genuinely changed the direction of my life. One of my instructors there, John Collins, took notice early — hired me as a lab assistant on campus, and before long I was troubleshooting issues across multiple computer labs and fixing workstations for other faculty. That hands-on, figure-it-out-as-you-go environment turned out to be the best education I could have asked for.
One afternoon I spotted an ad for a startup Internet access company and made the call. Within days I was working there — just me, the owner, and his girlfriend occasionally answering the phone. We had a handful of subscribers and not a lot else. Over the next few years, fueled in large part by aggressive marketing and a lot of late nights learning the technology from the inside out, that tiny company grew into PDQ.net — an ISP with more than 80,000 subscribers and over 5,000 active network ports. The company was acquired by an investor group, but what I walked away with was something no classroom could have given me: a deep, practical understanding of how the internet actually works, built during the years when the industry was being invented in real time.
It was also at PDQ.net that I met Christina, who would become my wife in 1999. We're still married, still in Texas, and she remains one of the sharpest people I've ever worked alongside.
In 1999, I accepted an offer from one of our vendors — Ascend Communications — to join as a Sales Engineer. Christina and I packed up and headed to Cedar Park, Texas, which has been home for both of us ever since. Before we'd even finished moving in, Ascend was acquired by Lucent Technologies, the engineering and manufacturing spin-off created after the government-mandated AT&T breakup in the 1980s. That transition put me inside a much larger machine, but the work was fascinating — supporting pre-sales for enterprise and carrier customers across some of the most complex network deployments in the region.
When Alcatel and Lucent merged in 2006 — the famous "merger of equals" — the combined entity became Alcatel-Lucent, and my role evolved with it. Then in 2016, Nokia acquired Alcatel-Lucent, and I found myself inside one of the largest telecommunications equipment companies in the world. When the Account Manager covering my local Texas territory moved on to a different team, I went after the position. I got it. From there I managed a named account territory stretching from California to Florida, with the bulk of my work in Texas — advising carriers and enterprise customers on SD-WAN, 5G, LTE, IP/MPLS, optical transport, fiber-to-the-home, and more technology than I can fit on a page.
Across those decades I developed deep expertise in IP routing and switching, SONET and DWDM optical transport, wireless access technologies, fiber access, metro Ethernet, network security, and network management. I'm equally at home on Windows, macOS, and Unix/Linux — the platform has never been the limiting factor. The breadth came naturally because the job demanded it — you can't advise Fortune 500 companies and major carriers without knowing the full stack.
After nearly 30 years in that world, I was ready for a change. I wanted to work directly with people — not through layers of procurement and executive approval chains — and actually solve the problems in front of me. So I started Catalano Technology Solutions. Whether it's your home network, your office infrastructure, your cloud setup, or something in a data center, I want to be the person you call. And I'll show up in person, because that's how it gets done right.
