Technology: Push for Tech Firms Downtown Draws More Interest
Over the past 18 months, Downtown business advocates have made a concerted push to attract high-tech firms by highlighting the 70,000 strand-miles of fiber-optic cable located there.
They even branded Downtown as Bandwidth Bay.
“Twenty-five years of Downtown redevelopment has created an appealing atmosphere to attract technology-driven companies,” said Peter Hall, president of the Centre City Development Corp. “We’re working with both residential and commercial developers to assure the integration of bandwidth into new and old developments throughout Downtown San Diego.”
Bandwidth, or the carrying capacity of copper wire or fiber-optic cable, connects an office to the Internet and determines the amount of data and speed at which files and videos can move from different points on the network.
Companies like Silicon Space, Simplenet, CollegeClub.com, Cayenta.com, Toonscape and MassHysteria have moved Downtown, each relying on high-speed connections to conduct business.
The city and the CCDC have made it easier for future high-tech companies looking to locate Downtown to find a suitable site.
A new Internet application designed by the city and the CCDC recently was unveiled outlining the proximity of the fiber-optic cable in the area. The geographic information system application consists of Downtown maps overlaid with images of existing fiber-optic installation in city streets and Downtown buildings.
“There’s a gold mine below the streets of Downtown,” said Steve Williams, general manager of Sentre Partners, a Downtown real estate investment company. “If you were a miner, you would want to know exactly where that gold is, right?”
Sentre Partners has worked to bring high-speed transmission technology to the Pacific Bell building at 101 W. Broadway and 225 Broadway, the old Home Savings Towers. Both buildings have been wired to meet the telecommunications demands of high-tech companies.
The fiber-optics in Downtown didn’t appear overnight. According to Hall, telecommunications providers have been working for some time and have invested millions of dollars to make fiber-optic cable available.
The buildings in which some 40 companies have located Downtown over the past year and a half because of Bandwidth Bay aren’t new either. All have been vertically wired and retrofitted to meet demands, Hall said.
“We’ll look back in 10 years and treat fiber-optic like electricity,” he said. “We will assume it’s there. Everybody is relying more and more on the ability to quickly and accurately communicate.”
Williams said fiber-optic was not utilized until recently because it was too expensive.
Just four years ago, he said, a T1 high-speed line cost about $2,000 a month. Today, the service is available for about $600 per month.
Williams said new technology will soon make copper networks, like telephone lines, extinct in the business world.
“The telephone is not dead, but it will die as people can send 1 million times more information through the glass highway (fiber-optic cable) than the copper highway,” Williams said. “The glass highway is the one everybody wants to get on, but it doesn’t go to every home in every neighborhood; it will.”
The new fiber-optic network mapping application is on the San Diego Geographic Information Source (SanGIS) server (www.sangis.org). It can also be reached at the Bandwidth Bay Web site (www.bandwidthbay.org).
SanGIS is a joint powers agency formed by the city and county in 1997 to serve as a digital geographic warehouse for the region.
According to Dianah Neff, the city’s chief information officer, the new application is the first step in a plan to identify fiber-optic availability throughout the region.
“I believe this first step will be a tremendous asset to CCDC’s marketing efforts for Downtown and the concept of Bandwidth Bay,” Neff said.
