Hi, I'm Brian Johnstone.

How I got here

I grew up in Canton, Ohio and was hooked on technology and communications early. My grandfather was a ham radio operator and had some of the first PCs and communications gear around, and that's probably where it started.

I got into this work in 1999, on early two-way broadband systems, installing cable modems and digital telephone and working outside plant. From there I spent eight years as a maintenance tech and fiber splicer, repairing outages and splicing new build across Northeast Ohio. Since then the builds have only gotten bigger: an 1,100 mile 864 and 1,728 count build, and fiber deployment for Windstream, AT&T Fiber, and Charter's RDOF project in Southern Ohio and East Texas, with a lot of my experience in long haul deployment and dark fiber monitoring.

The other half of what I do

The telecom work is only one side of it. I've been building things for about as long, from print design for bands and friends to running band pages on etree.org, my first Android app in 2010, and more websites than I can count. That habit never went away, and the two halves feed each other. The field work tells me what a tool actually needs to do, and knowing how to build means I can go make it. That blend is what Johnstone Technical Services is now: field knowledge put to work building websites, custom automation, and purpose-built tools that help telecom teams do their jobs better.

Why this site exists

One thing I enjoy most is training new techs, and I've got a natural way of doing it: I talk through everything I'm doing and why, so the person next to me understands the reasoning, not just the steps. That same approach shapes the guides here.

This site is where it all comes together: the field knowledge, the guides, and the tools that come out of both. Practical, real-world help for the people who keep these networks running, written and built the way I'd explain it to a tech standing next to me.