by Glenn Tschimpke
Staff Writer
Kris Ervin looked out the window over the 31 buildings of the Koger Center off Beach Boulevard in 1995 and had an idea. Why not link all the buildings together by a single technological thread that would allow multiple telecommunications vendors, minimum digging and maximum efficiency and reliability? Ervin approached the office park manager at the time and pitched his idea.
“They thought we were crazy,” said Ervin.
When the Koger Center was sold to LNR Property Corporation Eastern Region based out of Atlanta and renamed the Midtown Centre, Ervin tried again and got a bite, and by 1997 his company, Telecommunications Access Management, Inc. (TAMI), began implementing the plan. Consisting of an underground fiber optic network that weaves through the Midtown Centre and connects to each of its 31 buildings, Ervin’s fiber optic ring is an ingenious alternative to the snaking cables of multiple vendors across the property. Juxtaposed against the country’s oldest office park, the fiber optic lines brings new millennium technology to the buildings.
“What this means is tenants can get faster service, better Internet service, cheaper telecommunications services from either carriers or ourselves,” he said. “If a carrier, meaning AT&T, Sprint, MCI or Adelphia comes in makes connections at any one point, they’re immediately connected to our entire office complex. The other alternative is they dig up the road and build to individual buildings based on tenant requirements.”
After years of planning and digging, the fiber optic ring has been ready for less than a month and few tenants have caught on yet, but those who have say there is no comparison.
“We just got hooked up and I’m thrilled to get off the dial-up connection,” said said Eric Ramirez of CB Richard Ellis, leasing manager for the property. “It was very slow before and now I’m clicking through this. It’s great.”
Ramirez said that although he has promoted the ring in the past, it hasn’t been a selling point. Now that it is complete, it has drawn some interest with prospective tenants.
“The firm I met with yesterday, they were an engineering firm, they pass large files back and forth,” he said. “They need a dedicated T1 line. That’s something the Midtown Centre can offer.”
Fiber optic cable is considered the top-of-the-line carrier for electronic communications. Because fiber optic cable has virtually unlimited bandwidth — the amount of data, graphics, sound or other information that can be transmitted across its lines at a particular time — it is a popular choice for high volume applications. TAMI’s fiber optic ring takes advantages of fiber optic cable’s high capacity and flexibility. An Internet service provider can plug into anywhere on the ring and its services are available to the entire office park, which is a time and money-saving alternative to digging trenches to each individual building.
“What this is is a 144-lane super highway,” said Ervin. “A carrier would buy a slice of it. Let’s say Adelphia wanted 12 lanes, then we’d lease them 12 lanes.”
While larger companies enjoy the cost savings of the service, smaller outfits also reap benefits.
“What we have here is a two-person, three-person shop with the same bandwidth, the same technology and the same clear fiber optic cables as any of the big guys. It levels the playing field,” he said.
Ervin said the inherent flexibility of fiber optics comes to play if the ring were to be severed.
“If the fiber optic ring gets cut in one spot, all the circuitry just backtracks the other way,” he said. “So you’re not going to be out of service. If there’s two cuts, it does create an island. Both sides of the island would still be in service but the island itself would be out for a period of time.”
TAMI guarantees that service outages won’t exceed two hours.
While plugging into the ring is not mandatory for office park tenants or carriers, Ervin reasons that it is simply too beneficial not to use.
“What happens is we want the benefits of the ring to be so attractive that both tenants and carriers would want their services delivered this way,” he said. “We do an analogy. There’s only one I-95; you can certainly travel from New York to the Keys via U.S. 301 or U.S. 1, but it doesn’t make good sense when you’ve got a good high-speed highway you could use.”