BoingBoing has a nice article by Xeni Jardin about an Internet carrier hotel: One Wilshire in downtown Los Angeles. It’s based on a radio report Xeni prepared for NPR. She also posted a set of her pictures in Flickr, and I’ve posted an image under her Creative Commons license.
Last week I mentioned the Internet backbone. While the Internet is composed of many different connections used by many telecom companies, sometimes these companies have to link their bandwidth to share content or provide better service. It’s easier to interconnect across a room than under the sea! Among the amenities in this carrier hotel is the Meet Me Room. One Wilshire is a 30-story building that hosts collocated equipment and connections for 300 different ISPs and telecom companies including AT&T, Google, Level 3, Sprint, Time Warner, Verizon, and many other major companies.
Among other features, One Wilshire provides tenants with 100 watts of high-quality electrical power for each square foot of floor space, and the ability to provide backup power for at least 24 hours. The building has 656,000 square feet of space, so that’s a lot of power for switches, servers, and other equipment. Remember, you can’t do anything useful with a computer without the physical layer of the OSI model.
It’s interesting to note that One Wilshire was purchased in September 2001 by The Carlyle Group, the current owners of Hawaiian Telcom.
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