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Date: Thu, 01 Mar 2001 11:18:35 -0600 Subject: New York's Con Ed sends power to a telecom hotel -- its own To: sgoldste@nsf.gov From: NW View from The Edge <TheEdge@bdcimail.com> Reply-To: The Edge Help <NWReplies@bellevue.com>
NETWORK WORLD NEWSLETTER: DAVID ROHDE with THE VIEW FROM THE EDGE 02/27/01 - Today's focus: New York's Con Ed sends power to a telecom hotel -- its own
Dear STEVEN N GOLDSTEIN,
In this issue:
* How one utility is becoming a collocation provider. * Related links * Featured reader resource * IT Job Spot(tm): Mission-critical opportunities with marketplace winners
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By David Rohde
Recently we reported that the rise of collocation spaces for carriers and ISPs built largely on speculation has raised alarms at electric companies. They fear that proposals for such concentrated uses of power - up to 10 times the normal load for a commercial office building - could tax their ability to build out their power grids.
So here's an irony for you. New York's Consolidated Edison Co., far from shooing away collocation providers, has decided to become one itself.
Actually, the idea for a new collocation facility in Manhattan comes from Con Edison Communications (CEC), the electric utility's telecom subsidiary. CEC participates in a major telecom hotel at 111 Eighth Ave. in Manhattan, and last week announced it was offering 22,000 square feet of collocation space to ISPs, CLECs and value-added service providers.
CEC has hired 15-year Bell Atlantic veteran Peter Rust as president to lead the company's charge into the wholesale carrier's carrier business - which, in New York, could include services to financial firms that run big-time private networks.
CEC is running fiber up and down the island of Manhattan. It aims to directly connect 1,000 buildings in the next four years, and put itself within a few blocks of all the other buildings. It competes with metro fiber players like Metromedia Fiber Network, whose new long-haul buildout we wrote about last week (http://www.nwfusion.com/edge/columnists/2001/0219edge1.html), but CEC is concentrating on lighting its own fiber for both pure optical and SONET-ready services.
Among CEC's key suppliers are Cisco for its Cerent family of next-generation SONET boxes running up to OC-48, and Nortel for its OPTera metro optical switches supporting dense wave-division multiplexing (DWDM).
CEC doesn't have religious fervor about which technologies to favor, just a conviction that carriers in New York City need massive amounts of capacity. It'll support TDM, Gigabit Ethernet and pure IP. It'll also support DWDM, but only from POP to POP, not directly to the enterprise. "I can't cost-justify offering wavelengths to the building," Rust tells me.
Still, one of the things CEC will be promoting to service providers is the ability to run directly into buildings where all the enterprise customers are located. Rust says that his building model leaves him less concerned about the typical problems with in-building broadband service, centering around service providers who play a chicken-and-egg game of waiting to serve a building until they have signed up customers there.
That's largely a problem where service providers are trying to cost-justify T-1 voice and data services with relatively scant profit margins, he says. CEC and its carrier customers are going after bigger fish. "We'll offer a T-1 if we're in a building anyway," says Rust. "But we're not going to go into a building just for a T-1."
Regarding power requirements, Rust turns what others consider a problem into an opportunity. Perhaps because New York already has well-established carrier meet points, "there aren't that many collo hotels in the city," he says. "There are a number proposed, but I don't think they're all going to be built." The main point is this: "There are options for power companies - to go into the on-site generator business in these buildings, either primary or back-up."
Right now CEC is concentrating on the New York metro area, but it has applied for necessary regulatory approvals to operate in states from Maine to Washington, D.C. It's partnered with Neon Communications, which providers long-haul fiber transport services linking the population centers in the Northeast.
_______________________________________________________________ To contact David Rohde:
David Rohde, managing editor of Network World's The Edge, has been covering and analyzing telecom issues - from plain old telephone service to optical networking and everything between - since 1990. As a senior editor for Network World, he has specialized in frame relay, ATM and IP services, traditional and packet-switched voice services, and computer-telephony integration. David also analyzed local and long-distance tariffs and wrote rate-database documentation for the Center for Communications Management Information. He writes the popular "Eye on the Carriers" column every week in the Network World print edition. You can reach him at mailto:drohde@nww.com.
_______________________________________________________________ RELATED LINKS
Our most recent report about the power issue affecting collocation sites http://www.nwfusion.com/edge/columnists/2001/0129edge1.html
A recent report by Network World Senior Denise Pappalardo about AT&T's new Ultravailable Broadband Network service based on the Nortel OPTera equipment http://www.nwfusion.com/archive/2001/116244_01-29-2001.html
Our optical newsletter's most recent report on Cisco's optical business http://www.nwfusion.com/newsletters/optical/2001/00380622.html
Archive of the View from the Edge columns: http://www.nwfusion.com/edge/columnists/index.html ______________________________________________________________ FEATURED READER RESOURCE
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