Meet Me in San Antonio

Part of a series of articles published in FATPIPE magazine from 2003-2005 examining carrier interconnection options in major North American cities. This article was published in the February 2004 issue. To download the complete series as one consolidated PDF (2.7 MB), click here.

When in San Antonio, you must remember two things: The Alamo and the 100 Taylor Telecom Center. One was lit with gunfire; the other is lit with optical fiber.

San Antonio was a secondary market, so the flood of telecom build out was not as feverish as the primary markets. As a result, the carriers were not as motivated to build out huge stand-alone facilities in San Antonio and instead decided to locate their main POPs in the 100 Taylor Telecom Center.

The three-story building originally was built as a Studebaker dealership around 1912. Cars were parked on every floor, so the entire building is poured-in-place concrete. Serendipitously, that means the building now has ample floor loads for telecom equipment. Likewise, the elevator shaft was designed to carry four cars, meaning it now has a great riser for interconnections. Still, there are really two other motivating reasons for carriers to locate their network in the building.

For one, the building is only one block away from the SBC central office. SBC has both a copper DMARC in the basement and a fiber DMARC on the third floor, which travels directly to the central office via an aerial fiber home run. Additionally, every carrier that has hard network in the ground runs through the vault in the street directly in front of 100 Taylor. For this reason of proximity, other carriers began to locate there.

Secondly, when the music stopped for the telecom industry in late 2000, it was the only colocation game in town. Multiple carriers, with lit fiber and switching equipment, were located in the same building. That, coupled with the fact that the building was one of the only facilities to have all of the physical characteristics of a carrier hotel, plus proximity to the incumbent's main central office for the 210 area code one block away, made it the place to be.

Success was, in part, ensured by the lack of competition in the marketplace. Also, the building's owners are focused more on real estate than technology, so there is a very complementary relationship with the tenants. The owners are only looking for a fair rental rate for the building and have no intentions of offering any type of telecom services that might compete with their tenants.

Tenants are able to interconnect with one another very easily, with only a small interconnect fee. As might be expected at a facility whose virtues include lower rent, no enhanced services are offered. Going forward, the owners' main focus is to make the facility as user friendly to the tenants as possible. Their philosophy is the same as many of the other successful traditional real estate owner-operators, and that is the more successful their tenants are the more successful the facility will be.

One example of the owners' efforts to facilitate this atmosphere is their investment in conduit tracking software. More than 180 conduit runs have been documented and recorded on a CAD program, which combined with the software, allows the property manager to track conduit from suite to suite. So it's possible to identify the owner, contents and exact location of all conduits, all from the desktop computer in the manager's office. The tenant simply submits a request for pathway rights to the property manager listing the two desired termination points, and the property manager can then find any under-utilized conduit, or possibly empty conduit, from past tenants, saving everyone a lot of time and effort.

One of the most unique aspects of the subject property is a 225-foot cell tower that sits 30 feet away from 100 Taylor Telecom Center. The tower was originally erected in the early 1980s and was used by an existing tenant for its point-to-point microwave network. But the 100 Taylor Telecom Center now owns the tower, and it should be noted that the tower has conduit running directly into the building.

In downtown San Antonio, just two blocks away from the Alamo, it is very difficult to get permits for any new tower structures. Yet every wireless network must interconnect with the wired network somewhere, so what better place than the most "lit" building in central and south Texas. It's one more reason the 100 Taylor Telecom Center is definitely a site to check out if you need to be in the area.

For more information on the 100 Taylor Telecom Center, contact Brad Hardy, senior associate Cross & Company Commercial Realty Advisors, (210) 824-9080 x 287 or [email protected].

Originally published in FATPIPE magazine, February 2004.

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