He said that rather than choose a local and long-distance carrier, as some companies have, ''we installed a carrier-neutral backbone so that tenants could choose their carrier.'' The backbone is a series of copper and glass fiber lines that allow carriers access to tenants wherever they are in the building. Gilbert, 3d, the chief operating office of Rudin Management. ''We take a pretty long view of the future, and we will not allow our vertical risers to become clogged with the wires of companies that may not be around tomorrow or that may have different management,'' said John J. ''We work with owners to develop a plan that balances the needs of the building and the tenant.''Ĭontrol is what it is all about to leaders of the Rudin Management Company, which started the whole smart-building business when it converted an empty, obsolete office building at 55 Broad Street into a high technology center in early 1996. ''Wiring buildings is a relatively new phenomenon,'' he said. Healey, whose operation is a unit of the company that is scheduled to build a million-square-foot building on what is now a parking lot on Seventh Avenue between 49th and 50th Streets, said he works with building owners, rather than trying to take over communications management. Indeed, in some locations building managers have taken elevators out of service to provide more shafts to run cables. Healey, the president of Rockefeller Group Telecommunications Services. ''People bring cables in and they don't take the old ones out and pretty soon the riser is full,'' said Richard M. Some executives warn that turning telecommunications over to a third party provider could worsen the jam in the risers. At the Graybar Building an unneeded air shaft provided the needed vertical access, but at others the task was more difficult. One of the problems of wiring older buildings is the amount of wiring already in the vertical shafts, called risers. ''Most building owners don't know about technology,'' said Peter Fisher, the president of Netlink, a company that has wired 12 buildings in Manhattan. Tenants typically get one monthly bill for both the voice and data charges.Įxecutives of these telecommunications companies say having a direct link to the Internet eliminates the delays associated with dial-up systems and allows data to be exchanged much more quickly than connections utilizing a modem.īy turning telecommunications over to a third party, property owners and managers can concentrate on running their business without worrying about the latest developments in technology. The voice calls are usually transferred to an existing carrier, such as Bell Atlantic, while the data - E-mail and other Internet activities - go to computers at the headquarters of On Site Access and are then sent out onto the net. Hornig said the company runs parallel cables up the vertical shafts of a building for voice and data services. ''Our agenda is to give the same level of service in older, well-located buildings at half the rent.'' ''People expect these kinds of services in A buildings,'' Mr. Green, the chairman of the company, has said that Class B buildings are essential to Manhattan's economy because their lower rents allow companies that cannot afford Class A rents to stay in the city. He said it costs about 50 cents per square foot to wire a building. ''This is a value-added amenity that helps lease space and retain tenants,'' he said. Hornig said his approach was to make an agreement with a landlord and to pay for the cost of wiring a building in return for the opportunity to sell services to tenants. ''They have 50- to 60-year-old analog systems and are not prepared for the digital era.'' Hornig, executive vice president and a co-founder of On Site Access. ''Many buildings are technologically obsolete,'' said Daren W. But an official of Bell Atlantic, which is required by the Telecommunications Act of 1996 to share its facilities with competitors, said the newcomers were skimming the cream off the top of the market by offering service in densely populated areas, without the requirement to serve less lucrative rural areas. Most of these companies, which are known as facilities-based carriers, are offering their services to small- to medium-size businesses who they say would be unlikely to attract the attention of larger telecommunications companies.
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