Illinois Business Journal - Telecom hotels promise firms security, swifter access

Companies need not harbor reservations when it comes to booking dedicated server space with an Internet data center housed in a telecom hotel.

So says Jeff Florida, public relations manager for St. Louis-based Cybercon. The firm, which began seven years ago in Web development and transitioned into Internet hosting, now focuses exclusively on creating and maintaining dedicated servers for companies of all sizes and specialties.

The telecom hotel, Florida said, is the answer for companies whose Web sites sustain a high volume of hits daily, and who rely upon the speedy, uninterrupted and secure transfer of detailed data.

Concentrated in central business districts such as downtown St. Louis and high-tech corridors across the nation, these facilities provide the sophisticated infrastructure critical to housing equipment for telecom-related needs.

This new form of virtual real estate, Florida said, includes leased building space that offers fiber connectivity - within the building - to several major telecommunications carriers or "backbones," such as the carriers Cybercon has direct Internet connections through: AT&T, MCI WorldCom, Level 3 and Sprint.

"We have more than 800 dedicated servers for companies all over the world," Florida said. "In our telecom hotel, all the fiber is already in place. The number of connections we have in this space allows our clients direct connection to their users."

An Internet data center located within a telecom hotel - such as Cybercon's on the 7th floor of a North Tucker Boulevard office building in downtown St. Louis - offers companies a direct connection from their firm's server to several major Internet service providers. "If a company's server is connected to AT&T, for example, that company's (online) data would have to be routed to a city that has an AT&T backbone and be connected back to the firm's home base," he said. "Because Cybercon is located in a telecom hotel, companies can easily and efficiently transfer their data directly to their dedicated server at our location."

Keeping clients' proprietary information streaming through one direct channel - from the company's private server to users and back again - facilitates the ease of sharing information between several corporation locations throughout a state or from coast to coast, Florida said, without the fear that others may be able to tap into what's being transmitted.

"Many companies are asking for VPNs or virtual private networks as a means of encrypting information and sending it through a secure tunnel," Florida said. "This is a way to keep proprietary information secret, as opposed to transmitting it via the public Internet and risking the chance that it could be deciphered."

Load balancing, creating a system to automatically direct a company's Web traffic to several servers to avoid overloads on any particular server, is another value-added service companies such as Cybercon provide. Florida said that for firms competing on the front lines of e-commerce - to the tune of a million hits per day or more - hooking up with a hosting company that can guarantee 100 percent network up time is a wise investment to make.

"If your company is hosting its Web site through your own server without the necessary infrastructure in place, you risk a number of scenarios, such as power outages, that could bring down your site and keep you from conducting business," Florida said. "Telecom hotels, such as the one we are in, have three different power feeds, and back-up generators; when you couple this with the redundancy we have built into our data center, we can guarantee 100 percent network up time. We provide the infrastructure for hosting Web sites/servers for all kinds of companies worldwide, and it costs us less because with several major telecommunications carriers already in the building, there's no local loop charge for us."

James Quinn, senior director for Cushman & Wakefield Inc. in New York, says presence in major markets is paramount for telecom companies. But limited land for new construction and a lack of viable existing product presents a major challenge in identifying viable telecom properties.

"For developers and investors, however, this has led to a great opportunity, particularly in the form of adapting older industrial buildings for telecom usage," Quinn said. "In fact, a majority of telecom hotels today are former warehouse and distribution sites."

The transformation to the new economy model features the Internet as its primary platform, Quinn said.

"This data explosion has given rise to unprecedented demand by telecom companies for space that can support their rapidly changing business requirements," he said.