Alternately called telecom hotels, telco hotels or carrier hotels, buildings old and new are being designed (and redesigned) primarily to house the switches, routers, servers, cables and other equipment that handle traffic on the Internet. Although these buildings also house a few offices and maybe a bit of retail space on the ground level, it's the telco hardware that dominates the facility.
In Florida, particularly south Florida, there has been a flurry of telecom hotel activity in recent months. Large, struggling facilities such as downtown department stores, abandoned call centers and office buildings are finding new life. On West Palm Beach's Clematis Street, for example, Miami-based ABR Infocom is converting an old Burdines built in 1955 into a tech center that also will house retail on the street level. In suburban Tampa, TelePlace, a Boca Raton company, plans to rehab a 187,500-sq.-ft. call center. And in Boca Raton, Terremark Worldwide is rejuvenating the massive 1.8 million-sq.-ft. "Blue Lake" facility formerly occupied by IBM.
Telecom hotels are the "cause celebre" of the real estate industry right now, says Thomas A. Dean, a Fort Lauderdale-based director of Cushman & Wakefield of Florida. He adds, "The demand is growing exponentially." He projects a demand for 30 million to 35 million square feet nationwide and 3 million square feet in Florida from now until the end of 2001. Potential telecom hotel tenants are telecom carriers, Internet service providers, web hosting companies and application service providers (ASPs).
Telecom facilities have very definite building specifications. First, the buildings must have access to multiple fiber-optic providers, typically three to 10 commercial carriers such as BellSouth, Level 3 and MCI WorldCom. Even more important today is the availability of adequate power. The standard is 480 volt/3 phase power (100 to 200 watts per square foot), about 10 to 20 times that of a commercial office building. "The 1A issue is now power," says Dean, adding, "decisions are made according to power availability from separate substations."
The buildings must have 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week security, ceiling heights of 13 feet or more and floors reinforced to handle 150 pounds per square foot -- about three times more than the load requirements of a typical office building.
Nationwide, much of the telecom hotel activity has been in or near central business districts, where there is plenty of fiber availability. But there is also a growing concern by civic leaders that telecom hotels are creating dead zones in cities because the buildings typically have about 10% of the number of workers found in a commercial office building. To deal with that issue, some developers are adding a retail component to their buildings. ABR Infocom, which plans a 1.2-million-sq.-ft. mixed-use building in Miami's downtown core, will have retail space and a people-friendly landscaped atrium on the street level. "It brings life to the building," says Brian Friedman, ABR's president. And one of Florida's most visible projects, the six-story, 750,000-sq.-ft. Technology Center of the Americas (TECOTA) in Miami, also will have a retail component -- but for a different reason. Monty Bannerman, senior vice president for network services at Terremark Worldwide, the project's co-developer, says that as a protection against a storm surge in the case of a hurricane, the project will not put telecom equipment on the 36-foot-high ground floor. Instead, that space will be for retail. TECOTA's most prominent technology tenant will be the NAP of the Americas, a network access point for Internet traffic that is being built by a consortium of 42 companies.
It's likely that in the next year or two, telecom hotels will begin sprouting up outside of Florida's major metro areas as more companies lay more fiber in outlying regions. Says Cushman & Wakefield's Dean of the telecom hotel industry, "We're still in the infancy stage."
Tech Briefs
Three Florida cities are in the top 35 local markets for household access to the Internet, according to Nielsen/NetRatings. Orlando leads the state at No. 9, with 56% of households wired, followed by Tampa (No. 21), with 50%, and Miami (No. 34), with 43%.
The top five cities in the U.S. are San Francisco (66%), Seattle (64%), San Diego (62%), Portland (60%) and Washington, D.C. (59%).
The digital divide remains, particularly for African-Americans and Hispanics, according to a recent U.S. Department of Commerce report, "Falling Through the Net: Toward Digital Inclusion."
As of August, 23% of African-American households in the U.S. had access to the Internet, up significantly from 11.2% in December 1998 but still far behind the 41.5% national average. Hispanics also lag in access to the Internet, although there has been progress. Nationwide, 23.6% of Hispanic households are wired, up from 12.6% two years ago.
Bookmarks
From time to time, Florida Trend will ask Florida executives how they use the Internet.
M. Scott Faris, Chief Operating Officer
Ocean Optics Inc.
A Dunedin-based developer and supplier of optical-sensing systems and components
www.oceanoptics.com
A great site to get quick information on private technology companies is www.corptech.com. If the information looks good, it's then worth investing some time and money at www.dialogselect.com to get more detail.
If you are looking for a window on exciting new technologies, www.Yet2.com is a great clearinghouse for orphan corporate R&D projects.
The eBay of capital equipment is www.dovebid.com. This site consolidates the world of used capital equipment into a single location that even allows you to bid online during live auctions. Alternatively, if you like to barter and are trying to unload some inventory, try www.tradeout.com.
If you can't keep up reading trade magazines, www.prnewswire.com is a great site to scan press releases and is searchable by topic and company.
If you want to know what people are saying about you, your company, your products and your competitors, it's worth scanning some discussion forums available through www.deja.com/usenet.
Tech Word of the Month: Gnutella
Now that Napster has said it will begin charging a subscription fee, are the days of free Internet music over? Perhaps not. An alternative to Napster is Gnutella (gnutella.wego.com), an open-source file-sharing software program originally developed by AOL's Nullsoft music division but later renounced by the Internet giant.
Gnutella, which touts itself with the phrase "spread the sweetness," takes its odd name partly from Nutella, a chocolate and hazelnut spread that is popular among Europeans. Unlike Napster, Gnutella is a "peer-to-peer" program, which means that users trade files without going through a central server. Text, spreadsheet, MP3 and other types of files may be shared. In the Washington Post in May, Netscape co-founder Marc Andreesen said of Gnutella: "It changes the Internet in a way that it hasn't changed since the browser."
The downside of Gnutella is that its peer-to-peer architecture doesn't seem to work very well with lots of users. Whether that problem turns out to be just a bump in the road or a fatal flaw is yet to be seen.