Network in Motion: Glenn’s Thirty-Year Career in Event Connectivity
In speaking with Glenn Evans, the phrase “controlled chaos” comes up more than once. After nearly three decades in network engineering, Glenn has built internet infrastructure in everything from bare-bones convention centers to the top floor of 100-story skyscrapers — usually under tight deadlines, with dozens of vendors vying for the same elevator shaft.
“This industry doesn’t allow you to push deadlines,” Glenn says. “The show starts at 9 a.m., and you’re ready or you’re not.”
He got his start in the mid-90s during the Novell days — a time when IPX was still the transport protocol and trade shows like Interop served as the nucleus of the global networking community. At Interop, Glenn volunteered on the “InteropNet” — a vendor-neutral demo network built on-site at each show. It was in that churn-and-burn environment, assembling a working multi-vendor network from scratch in a matter of days, that Glenn realized he had “a mindset bent” for event networking.
Today, he’s the principal of Acrux Consulting and the event network manager for a major convention facility in San Francisco. While some parts of the job have changed — the gear, the standards, the scale — others haven’t. “At the end of the day,” Glenn says, “you’ve still got to run a cable somewhere.”
Fast, Temporary, and Foolproof
Much of Glenn’s work revolves around designing and deploying networks in temporary venues: product launches, corporate summits, gaming tournaments, and international trade shows. He estimates he’s built infrastructure in nearly every type of facility, from hotel ballrooms to massive open-air spaces.
“One recent job gave us access to the building at 11 p.m.,” he recalls. “By 3 p.m. the next day, the network had to be show-ready. It was a hundred floors up. It took three minutes just to get the gear in the elevator. And we were sharing it with the audio crew, staging crew, scenic team, and broadcast guys. Twenty-five hours later, we were tearing it all out.”
In those conditions, simplicity isn’t just a preference — it’s survival. Glenn adheres to the “KISS principle” (keep it simple, stupid), aiming for standardized, rugged equipment with minimal failure points. “You’ve got one shot,” he says. “You don’t get to troubleshoot for a day.”
From Temporary Builds to Permanent Infrastructure
Not all of Glenn’s work is built on a ticking clock. His dual role includes managing long-term network design and operations for a convention center that hosts events week after week, sometimes 30,000 attendees at a time.
“The permanent installations bring a different kind of complexity,” Glenn says. “You have to design for flexibility. One client wants a connection out in the picnic area; another wants it wired to a temporary studio stage in the middle of an atrium. You’re constantly adapting.”
He compares the evolution of event networking to road development: “We’ve gone from one-lane country roads to six-lane interstates,” he says, referencing the transition from 10-megabit hubs to 100-gig backbones. But the foundational concepts, bandwidth, reliability, and fast deployment remain consistent.
Monitoring: It Has to Just Work
Glenn is candid about the stakes. If the network fails, it’s not just a minor inconvenience — it’s an event-crippling disaster.
“If somebody’s telling me something’s broken, I’ve already failed,” he says. “I should’ve known before it hit them.”
That’s why Glenn’s team relies heavily on monitoring tools, including Path Solutions’ TotalView platform. “It gives us visibility,” he explains. “If a device is connecting at 100 meg, when everything else is gigabit or better, TotalView tells us. It might be a camera, or it might be a bad dongle. But we know.”
He’s quick to note, though, that no tool is perfect for every job. Over the years, he’s trialed everything from SolarWinds to PRTG, noting that many tools “try to do too much” and end up bloated and hard to use. “We’re not managing Windows servers,” Glenn says. “We just need to know what our ports are doing.”
Sweat the Asset
Glenn takes a “military hardware” approach to procurement: rugged, overbuilt equipment that can handle years of abuse. “Vintage tech,” he jokes. “Still works better than some of the new stuff.”
Right now he mostly uses MicroTik routers, HP Aruba switches, and even old Cisco gear bought secondhand.
That’s not to say he avoids innovation — just that he’s wary of flash over function. “Some platforms are modular to the point of madness,” he says. “By the time you’ve bought the features you need, it’s no longer worth it.”
What he’s looking for is stability — gear that travels well, tools that install quickly, and systems that give his team time to focus on the job at hand: fast, secure, resilient networks that just work.
Looking Forward
When asked what’s changed most, Glenn doesn’t hesitate: “People. We used to have more people doing this work. Now it’s fewer people, same workload. So your tools have to be smarter.”
He sees promise in LLM-powered tools and predictive analytics to enhance the foresight of engineers, not replace them. “If the software can say, ‘Hey, we’ve seen this anomaly before,’ that’s a powerful thing,” Glenn says. “Then you can act before it becomes a crisis.”
In Glenn’s world, good engineering is invisible. “If we do our job right, nobody knows we exist,” he says. “But they’re connected. And that’s the whole point.'“