Embarcadero Center Plays Giant Laser Tag

Telecom Rubber Meets the Road... I've written about telecom recently, so I decided to pay a "real world" visit to Larry Morgan, Director of Engineering at the Embarcadero Center, one of San Francisco's premier office addresses -- like Hines' 101 California Street, today's sponsor(!).  Morgan has his fair share of telecom war stories.  For example, from the roof of Embarcadero Four, he pointed to a collection of telecom equipment on the roof of Embarcadero One.  Apparently both Winstar and Teligent each spent $250,000 building telecom connectivity for tenants in the Embarcadero Centers, including "special spaces for equipment, steel infrastructure for the antenna array, helicopter lifts and a 4-inch riser installation."  Yep, you guessed it.  They have zero customers in the  Embarcader Center complex.

But Morgan does have a customer for his wicked looking Optical Access laser that blasts data at over 1 Gbps (giga bits per second) between two of the Center's buildings.   As I stood on top of Four Embarcadero Center and looked down the "barrel" of the unit, I could see a red dot on Embarcadero West three blocks away.  Cool.  Embarcadero Center uses the Optical Access laser, which requires line-of-site, because of permit problems digging up city streets for a fiber optic connection.

When Boston Properties bought the 4-million-square-foot Embarcadero complex in 1998, one of Morgan's first priorities was to retain NetsWork, Inc. to prepare a riser management plan -- a huge project.   Here's a "before picture" and an "after picture."  Wow, what a difference.  Among other changes, implementation of this plan required that tenants understand that riser space was no longer their private space so telephone patch panels, network hubs and the like had to go.  It's been a big educational process.  In fact, Boston Properties has completely outsourced the actual management of Embarcadero's riser space to NetsWork, Inc. ... So I walked away from my real world experience with the feeling that -- aside from technology issues -- telecom providers must deal with a host of complicated management issues to be successful.  It ain't easy.

--Peter Pike / ppike@pikenet.com