Network Operations & Telecom Consulting
Layer 9 LLC helps carriers, service providers and enterprises run the part of the network no protocol covers: the incident bridge, the escalation path, the runbook, and the decisions made at 2 a.m. Twenty-four years of carrier operations, from DWDM and SONET to SIP and the SBC edge.
Network engineers joke that most problems live at Layer 8, the user. The expensive ones live one layer higher: in how an organization detects, escalates, communicates and restores. A fiber cut is a Layer 1 event. A four-hour outage on top of it is usually a Layer 9 failure.
Layer 9 brings hands-on depth in all seven technical layers and the operational discipline above them. We read the PCAP and run the bridge, tune the alarms and write the SOP, then hand you a process your team can own.
Layer 1 → Layer 9
Every outage starts on a wire. Every recovery runs through people.
Engagements are scoped to a problem, not a headcount: a project, a fractional role, or on-call escalation support.
Structured bridge leadership for high-visibility outages, plus the playbooks that make the next one shorter.
Assess and build 24x7 operations: escalation tiers, handoffs, queues, KPIs and the tooling around them.
Carrier-grade voice troubleshooting and interconnect support across SIP, IMS and legacy SS7/TDM.
Fault isolation and service assurance across DWDM, SONET, MPLS and BGP, including chronic impairments.
Six Sigma-informed process work that turns tribal knowledge into documented, repeatable operations.
Carry TDM, SONET and SS7-era services into IP and cloud environments without losing what kept them reliable.
A focused discovery call and review of recent incidents, tickets and escalation paths. We agree on the problem worth solving.
Trace failures across layers and teams: alarms, handoffs, tooling, documentation. Find where time is actually lost.
Hands-on fixes and new process: runbooks, escalation models, alarm tuning, bridge structure, measured against a baseline.
Training, documentation and a written RCA-style report so your team owns the result after we leave.
24 × 7 × 365
Calm on the bridge. Clear in the RCA.
Incident command experience from high-visibility simplex, fiber-impact and chronic impairment events.
Outcomes from the principal's tenure in AT&T Network Operations Centers and enterprise support teams.
Platform availability maintained across mission-critical voice and network infrastructure over a 13-year NOC tenure.
Enterprise portfolio supported across five Fortune 500 accounts, with $100M+ in contract renewals tied to service quality.
Daily ticket volume, through proactive detection of non-alarmed outages using database and log analysis.
Year-over-year reduction in technical field dispatches through SME product testing and network analysis tooling.
Engineers led as Technical Lead of a VoIP Technical Resource Center, setting escalation standards across domestic and international teams.
Fault detection in a production support lab built from procurement to production, down from 1–2 hours.
Principal Consultant
Justin spent more than two decades in carrier network operations, most recently as a Principal Specialist and Tier 2/3 escalation lead in AT&T's Network Operations Centers. He has run technical bridges for major simplex, fiber-impact and chronic impairment events, and led root cause analysis on FCC-reportable incidents.
His work spans every layer: optical transport and SONET at the bottom, MPLS and BGP in the middle, SIP, SBC and IMS voice at the top, and the escalation, documentation and process discipline that hold it all together. Layer 9 LLC is based in St. Charles, Missouri and works with clients remotely.
Telecom and operations consulting; contract telephony engineering.
Tier 2/3 escalation lead and incident commander across Layers 1–7; RCA and FCC reporting.
Led a 32-person VoIP Technical Resource Center; Fortune 500 enterprise service.
First role in carrier telecom operations.
Or what keeps almost breaking. A first conversation is free and usually takes 30 minutes.
