Technical Certifications and Industry Credentials

Dennis is a MikroTik Certified Trainer and holds an extensive collection of MikroTik engineering certifications. His current certifications and professional credentials include:

• MikroTik Certified Trainer
• MikroTik Certified Traffic Control Engineer (MTCTCE)
• MikroTik Certified Routing Engineer (MTCRE)
• MikroTik Certified Wireless Engineer (MTCWE)
• MikroTik Certified IPv6 Engineer (MTCIPv6E)
• MikroTik Certified Enterprise Wireless Engineer (MTCEWE)
• MikroTik Certified Security Engineer (MTCSE)
• Hurricane Electric IPv6 Sage
• Cambium Networks ePMP Certification

Earlier in his career, Dennis also earned certifications from Cisco, Novell NetWare, and Microsoft . Although these earlier certifications are no longer active, they helped establish the broad networking and systems foundation that Dennis has continued to build upon throughout his career.

Service to the Broadband Industry

Dennis served for a total of 12 years on the Board of Directors of WISPA , the broadband industry association formerly known as the Wireless Internet Service Providers Association.

He initially served for 10 years and later returned to the board for an additional two-year term. During his service, Dennis contributed technical knowledge, industry experience, strategic direction, and organizational leadership as WISPA grew into a major representative of fixed-wireless, fiber, and independent broadband providers.

Early Career and Education

Dennis Burgess began his career by attending Vatterott College, where he pursued an Associate of Applied Science degree in Computer Electronics and Network Technologies. Demonstrating an exceptional aptitude for technology, Dennis tested out of nearly 60% of the curriculum and completed the program in just over one year.

Before graduating, Dennis had already entered the IT consulting field, joining Networkz Consulting Group, where he gained valuable experience supporting businesses throughout the region. He later accepted a position with Trinity Companies, Inc., a larger consulting organization, where he worked with clients including McEagle Development, Paric Corporation, and numerous other organizations throughout the Midwest. These early consulting experiences provided the foundation for what would become a career focused on enterprise infrastructure, networking, and systems engineering.

Transforming Surdyke Motorsports

Prior to founding Link Technologies, Inc., Dennis served as Senior Technical Engineer for Surdyke Motorsports, Inc., one of the nation's premier family-owned powersports retailers. During his tenure, the company operated retail locations across Missouri and Illinois, including three Harley-Davidson dealerships, two Yamaha dealerships, and two full-service marinas.

Dennis was brought in to modernize an aging technology infrastructure centered around SCO OpenServer, leased communication circuits, and hardware multiplexers. Over the following years, he led a complete transformation of the company's information systems, replacing a single-server environment with a modern Microsoft Windows domain infrastructure that included Active Directory, file servers, Microsoft Exchange, centralized management systems, Cisco networking equipment, and MikroTik routing platforms.

One of the most significant accomplishments during this period was the migration of the entire organization to a fully IP-based network, allowing seven geographically dispersed retail locations to operate as a single, integrated enterprise. Supporting more than 200 desktop systems, Dennis and a staff of only two IT professionals successfully managed all corporate technology, communications, networking, and infrastructure from a centralized location.

Dennis also played a key role in expanding the company's online presence, designing and deploying one of the largest Harley-Davidson online parts operations in the United States. The systems and infrastructure developed during this time helped position Surdyke Motorsports as one of the industry's leaders in both retail operations and e-commerce.

Co-Founding 2K Wireless

While serving at Surdyke Motorsports, Dennis co-founded 2K Wireless, a regional Wireless Internet Service Provider (WISP). Starting with a single T1 Internet circuit and a MikroTik router running from an IDE Disk-on-Module, he designed, deployed, and operated the network from the ground up.

The experience provided Dennis with valuable insight into the technical and operational challenges faced by Internet service providers, including wireless backhaul, routing, customer provisioning, traffic engineering, and network scalability. Although 2K Wireless was later sold to a neighboring WISP, the experience laid the groundwork for what would become more than two decades of consulting and engineering work for ISPs and WISPs across North America.

Founding Link Technologies, Inc.

In 2006, Dennis founded Link Technologies, Inc. to provide specialized networking support, engineering, and consulting services. The company initially focused on MikroTik, StarOS, Cisco, and Juniper Networks platforms.

Link Technologies has since developed into a full-service engineering and consulting company serving Internet service providers, wireless Internet service providers, municipalities, townships, educational institutions, utilities, government agencies, enterprise organizations, and projects involving the United States Department of Defense .

Network Engineering and Consulting Experience

Dennis has completed countless bridged-to-routed network conversions and has helped thousands of consulting customers design, deploy, optimize, and troubleshoot their networks.

His consulting and engineering experience includes:

• Service-provider and enterprise network architecture
• Bridged-to-routed network conversions
• ISP and WISP core-network design
• Router and switch configuration
• RF planning and wireless path analysis
• CAPsMAN and centrally managed wireless deployments
• Cisco, Juniper, and MikroTik routing and switching
• IPv4 and IPv6 network design
• Border Gateway Protocol (BGP)
• Open Shortest Path First (OSPF)
• Routing Information Protocol (RIP)
• Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS)
• Virtual Private LAN Service (VPLS)
• Virtual Extensible LAN (VXLAN)
• Ethernet VPN (EVPN)
• Virtual Routing and Forwarding (VRF)
• Policy routing and multiple routing tables
• Traffic shaping, queuing, and Quality of Service
• Ethernet over IP (EoIP)
• Generic Routing Encapsulation (GRE)
• Secure Socket Tunneling Protocol (SSTP)
• WireGuard VPN deployments
• Virtual LANs (VLANs)
• Network redundancy and high-availability design
• Network troubleshooting and performance optimization
  
  

His experience ranges from small network deployments to complex, multi-location service-provider infrastructures. Dennis is frequently engaged to resolve routing, switching, wireless, and performance problems that organizations have been unable to resolve internally.

TowerCoverage.com

Dennis also helped establish TowerCoverage.com , a division of Link Technologies, Inc.

TowerCoverage.com provides professional RF-propagation modeling, coverage mapping, link planning, path analysis, and broadband planning tools for WISPs, ISPs, municipalities, consultants, and wireless-network engineers.

Dennis has helped develop TowerCoverage.com into what he considers an industry-standard RF-planning platform for wireless Internet service providers. The platform allows network operators to evaluate potential coverage, analyze tower locations, model wireless links, and make informed network-deployment decisions.

More Than Two Decades of Practical Experience

With more than 20 years of MikroTik, Juniper, Cisco, routing, switching, and service-provider networking experience, Dennis continues to help organizations build reliable, scalable, secure, and high-performance networks.

Whether he is designing an ISP backbone, troubleshooting a complex BGP environment, planning a wireless deployment, converting a network from bridging to routing, or teaching engineers how to use MikroTik RouterOS, Dennis focuses on practical solutions that can be successfully deployed and maintained in real-world environments.