New York's Con Ed Sends Power to a Telecom Hotel -- Its Own
[FAC: This is indeed an interesting development. Let's see if the utility is required by the PSC to deliver equal treatment for power to other entities in the same business, that it affords itself. In Telecom, about a decade plus ago, when Open Network Architecture (ONA) was at its height of hype, they called this providing "equal and comparably efficient" access to network resources. It's what the incumbents are supposed to avail their competitors in a non-predatory way. See comments below on this and other dichotomies that I'm sure will cause some controversy and yap from the ILECs in coming months. I wonder. Does Telergy have a shot here? From the NETWORK WORLD NEWSLETTER: DAVID ROHDE with THE VIEW FROM THE EDGE.]
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).
[FAC: Interestingly, these are the two primary choices one has when
opting for a "managed service" from MFN, too. Making it eminently more
simple for making apples to apples comparisons. Meanwhile, the ILECs are
still holding out, for the most part, avoiding any push to dark or next-
generation (GbE and Cisco DPT/SRP) protocol-enabled platforms. And when
they do, it's under a "special assembly" or "limited service offering" arrangement
that takes months to "engineer" and a king's bankroll to purchase.]
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. |
