Inside a neutral collocation facility

The term "greenfield" often refers to brand-new outside and underground plants for next-generation carriers seeking to lock their old-line competitors inside that horrid box called "legacy."

But "greenfield" might just as well apply to inside facilities like the new collocation data centers that link multiple carriers with ISPs, ASPs, CLECs, VPN providers and, yes, even legacy telcos.

Colo.com is a neutral collocation company whose executives boast of their all-overhead structured cabling plant designed in advance for multiple carrier cross-connects -- to avoid that awful spaghetti-bowl look and feel of so much inside wiring. Last week I visited Colo.com's Vienna, Va., facility to see for myself.

Sure enough, the only raised floor in the facility supports Colo.com's Uninterruptible Power Supply equipment. Throughout the rest of the building, there are color-coded overhead conduits for coaxial cable, twisted-pair copper, fiber and power lines. Example: The blue cables indicate Category 5e wiring that Colo.com will use to support 1000-Base-T Gigabit Ethernet-over-copper connections.

[For a recent Network World report on users' experience with 1000-Base-T, see "Early copper Gigabit users rave on the technology", and a companion article, "Quick fix can cure Gigabit Ethernet/cable headache,".]

On the roof are antennas to support Colo.com's wireless connectivity service for such carriers as Advanced Ratio Telecom. Inside are cabinet upon cabinet of 19"- and 23"-wide rack spaces (measuring their internal dimensions). Each is supplied as standard equipment with six twisted pairs and two coaxial cables -- generally for DS-3 circuits -- plus the option of dropping fiber into the cabinets.

For customers leasing entire cages of various sizes, each cage is equipped with an inside camera assigned an Internet e-mail address, as a backup to the overall facility's multiple security checks. There are special staging areas where only Colo.com employees are allowed, and an operations and control center linked to the other two dozen Colo.com sites via a WorldCom T-1 frame relay net (with thoughts of upgrading to T-3 ATM).

Senior Operations Manager Michael Carroll explains the partly empty look of the place by the fact that the collocation business is a chicken-and-egg game. Collo is the one area of the telecom and Internet industry where providers want to travel in a pack rather than beat each other's brains in. So any sales rep trying to sell collo space to a service provider has to prove that other service providers, especially big transport players, are already committed.

That's why this facility has two "meet-me areas" on either side, with carriers like Verizon and WorldCom on one side and Qwest and Level 3 setting up on the other. Carroll cites VPN, DSL and fixed-wireless player XO Communications as one carrier that particularly wants to follow the other carriers around in places like this.

All in all, the Vienna, Va. Colo.com is 65% sold out. Even though collo space supply nationwide is still short of demand, all collocation providers still have a sales job to do. We'll be visiting more of these quintessential network-edge locations and reporting on them as the year progresses.

» posted by ITworld staff

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