The best hookups happen inside this downtown Manhattan office building
May 11, 2016
Source: Crain’s New York Business
The outside of 325 Hudson St. looks like an ordinary office building. Inside, though, it holds the guts that help bring the internet to New Yorkers.
The building is what the tech industry calls a “carrier hotel.” It’s owned by Netrality, a company that connects major content providers including Google, Facebook and Netflix to smaller internet service providers including RCN, EarthLink and, most recently, Rainbow Broadband. At the carrier hotel’s heart is the “meet-me room,” shown here. It’s a nerve center of fiber-optic cables and switches that saves streaming services the hassle of running cables directly to each service provider.
“It’s like an airport,” said Netrality founder Hunter Newby, where service providers are the airlines and frequent fliers are the Hulus and HBOs of the internet that are hoping to send their content from point A to point B. “Would it make any sense for Delta to have its own airport and JetBlue to have its own airport?” Newby said.
