Building a High-Bandwidth Mecca
In Silicon Valley, people seek out and fund the ideas they hope will be the next Google. Although such role models are rare here, it helps to understand what a Google would mean to the region. Google, founded just seven years ago, has close to $5 billion in revenue, over 4,000 employees, most of whom work at its headquarters, and a market capitalization of over $120 billion.
Salary.com estimates that around 1,000 Google employees have become millionaires (not counting a few billionaires). The Wall Street Journal reported that the area has encountered one problem: finding enough multimillion-dollar homes in the well-off town of Atherton to meet demand from 29-year-old Google millionaires. Clearly the spinoff benefits of developing rapidly growing global businesses can be quite high.
What kind of infrastructure does a Google need? Google processes 80 billion searches a day. That averages to about a million searches a second. This requires humongous data pipes to take the search requests in and feed the search results out. Other giant web businesses, like Amazon, Yahoo, eBay, iTunes, and Expedia, need similarly massive bandwidth and ultrafast data switches that connect them with their customers. Altogether, these businesses employ tens of thousands of people and have brought hundreds of billions of dollars of venture capital, stock-market value, paychecks, and dividends to their home regions. It's no accident that these businesses are located in cities that have the robust digital infrastructure needed to support global connectivity.
Spokane's Digital Infrastructure
Can Spokane play in the Google arena? Do we even have the bandwidth to support such data-intensive activities? The surprising answer to both questions is yes, if we solve a few nagging problems. Spokane happens to have five Internet backbones passing through its city limits, with enough potential bandwidth to serve many a Google. Unfortunately, we can't access all of that bandwidth directly, and the backbones don't connect with each other here, impeding development of data-intensive businesses and delaying handoff of data from one carrier to another. In addition, we don't have the kinds of ultrafast switches locally that would optimize Internet access for such data-intensive businesses.
The situation is like having five bullet-train lines passing through town without a station. The only way to get onto these bullet trains is to take a creaky stagecoach on dusty roads to a station in Seattle, Portland, or Salt Lake City first. The local stage lines have limited capacity and often limited speed, even though multi-gigabit railroads are passing right through town. For us to build a Google, we need to have a station here in town--a Union Station where all the backbones can share traffic. Spokane fought to be a railroad center in the 19th century, which drove much of our economic progress in the 20th century. We have to take action now to become equally important for the economy of the 21st century.
The solution is to combine a GigaPoP with a Meet-Me Room, and tie them into the regional fiber-optic network known as NoaNet. The Phoenix Project has plenty of room for both a Meet-Me Room and a GigaPoP, with traffic managed by a mainframe-sized network router capable of handling trillions of simultaneous transactions per second. This new, virtually unlimited access to massive bandwidth would help solidify Spokane's position as one of the most wired cities in the world, attracting new organizations that need such bandwidth for their own uses, for business, for research, for testing. Spokane cannot easily grow a Google or a Yahoo or an eBay (with their thousands of high-paid employees) unless we provide Google-sized Internet access. Likewise, the region's universities cannot compete with other, more connected universities in research on the future of the Internet--research that can spin off startups and high-paying jobs--without Google-sized Internet access.
Why is this kind of connectivity so important? Doesn't all the data travel at the speed of light, no matter where it comes from? Not in actual practice. According to the Progressive Policy Institute, "congestion at network hubs and junctions makes places with high levels of capacity better positioned to be home to companies that distribute large amounts of data via the Internet. If the ‘pipes' are not big enough relative to the amount of data going through them, data transmission speeds will slow." Our pipes are world-class; we just can't hook up to them yet. In practice, it's as if they didn't exist. This isn't a problem for most consumers and small businesses, but "it can be an issue for companies, especially companies that are hosting and transiting large amounts of data. As a result, having a high capacity of Internet backbone in a metropolitan area relative to demand is a competitive advantage."
A Little Internet Background
The Internet was initially set up to distribute information, broken up into small chunks of data called packets, through a widely decentralized network. As the Internet became commercialized, it became more centralized, focused around a smattering of cities that had large numbers of users, using a limited number of long-distance backbones to carry data. The growing traffic began clogging up the Internet's major hubs and switches. Users in cities like Spokane essentially have to send their data hundreds of miles to the hubs, where it's switched and sent on to the recipient--even if the message is only going across town. In the hubs--known as Tier 1 cities--the backbone operators established direct connections between the backbones. This private peering essentially allows each backbone to bypass the public Internet to gain direct access to customers of other backbones. Peering is far more cost-effective than transit, the current alternative available here, which requires smaller service providers to lease an access pipe connecting to a larger backbone provider, which then connects the smaller provider to all its dozens of peering partners, giving the ISP indirect access to the entire Internet.
Spokane can achieve Tier 1 connectivity, with direct access to multiple Internet backbones, a level few cities have achieved. But to do so, we have to make it possible for all of the backbones passing through here to set up private peering arrangements with each other and with customers in the region. As private peering arrangements increase, more service providers and businesses see value in creating their own peering arrangements here, creating a virtuous circle in the growth of bandwidth capacity, accessibility, and use.
What Is a GigaPoP?
A GigaPoP is not the largest-sized soft drink at ZipTrip, but an Internet Point of Presence with true gigabit access. The major Internet backbones operate at gigabit speeds, but local access is usually a thousand times slower. Faster access speeds lead to faster response times for businesses that use large amounts of bandwidth. For example, HDTV requires OC42 (2.5 gigabit) speeds for transmission. With direct gigabit access to the Internet, the region can become a center for testing and development of valuable new technologies such as HDTV video-on-demand, medical informatics, and any other high-bandwidth applications. By having such access already in place during the development phase of these technologies, we also position residents in the region to be first to take advantage of the latest advances as soon as they become commercially available, maintaining our advantage over other regions.
The initial planning for a GigaPoP is now underway. It will help invigorate the completion of VPNet, which proposes linking all regional research institutions and universities with high-bandwidth fiber to promote both distance learning and research collaboration. The first links of this network have already been established. The GigaPoP will enhance the ability of VPNet to provide real-time research sharing, real-time remote classes, real-time monitoring of experiments, and research on new networking or security technologies.
What Is a Meet-Me Room?
A Meet-Me Room sounds like a place for blind dates to find each other, but it's actually a place for data to find a shorter route to its destination. As the Internet clogs up, there is more demand for new transfer points where private backbones can share data without its having to pass through the existing nodes.
The Internet uses what's called "hot-potato routing," which means data packets directed from one service provider to another must be handed off at the earliest opportunity. Currently data from Spokane (and anywhere in the region) must travel slowly to distant cities before it can be handed off. This leads to delay in the time it takes outgoing data to reach its destination, potential lost packets that must be retransmitted, and other problems that can be ameliorated with a regional Meet-Me Room located in Spokane. What we're talking about is a carrier-neutral Network Access Point (NAP) similar to a Metropolitan Access Exchange like MAE-West in San Jose and MAE-East in Washington, DC.
A meet-me-room that not only supports current demand, but also anticipates market trends, encourages startups developing new technologies and services like storage-area networking, network security, remote security monitoring, content networking, and voice-over-IP (VoIP). Growth for such startups can be fast and impressive. Vonage was a pioneer in VoIP, yet the company is only three years old. It attracted over $400 million in venture capital and already employs 1,500. Skype sold to eBay only 18 months after its inception for $4 billion. Imagine what those figures would mean in the Spokane economy. But a Vonage or Skype could not be built here without access to vast data pipes.
The Phoenix Project Meet Me Room can enhance the power of national service providers, regional businesses, universities, government agencies, and other organizations. It would provide at least a dozen major benefits to the Spokane region:
1) Tier 1 status enables Spokane to become the primary backup location for the geologically unstable region west of the Cascades, including not only Seattle, but also Vancouver, BC and Portland. This status becomes a major selling point for the EDC and a valuable asset to recruiting outside venture capital to the region for the creation of startups that focus on either advanced Internet technologies or bandwidth-intensive services.
2) Two million underserved subscribers between the Cascades and the Great Plains will become available for gigabit Internet access. By aggregating this mass of customers, Spokane positions itself as a switching center on par with Seattle, Portland, Salt Lake City, Denver, and Minneapolis.
3) Access prices for volume users will drop substantially.
4) Backbone providers would have a private peer-to-peer node that will help to avoid congestion in the public Internet. This would also be useful to their customers who lease private bandwidth, which is not carried over the public Internet.
5) Underutilized buildings located near Spokane's Metropolitan Area Network (eMAN) will become valuable properties for telecom users, including high-bandwidth businesses like computer animators, 3-D modelers, and back-office data analysts and data warehouses. The eMAN encompasses much of the city.
6) Newly connected, at-home workers, using regional gigabit access for data, voice, and video, by virtue of no/low overhead, will be competitive with overseas call centers and back-office operations.
7) Universities, businesses, and new, private research institutions similar to SRI or Rand Corporation would have direct access to multi-gigabit backbones, rather than transmitting through creaky stage lines first.
8) Regional universities would, for the first time, have the highest-speed direct access to the Internet2/Abilene and other research networks.
9) Terabyte data files from the National Institutes of Health, Department of Defense, US Geological Survey, and other federal research facilities will be accessible on a real-time basis.
10) The supercomputer at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory will be accessible to regional research institutions on a real-time basis.
11) Data servers like Akamai will able to build server farms here, putting them closer to over 500 thousand local users and two million regional users for serving web pages, improving web response speed.
12) Spokane telecom startups like World Wide Packets and Vivato can test their high-speed equipment on the highest-speed backbones and regional networks to assess real-world performance.
Although the GigaPoP and the Meet-Me Room would be located in Spokane, the largest-scale benefits will be made possible by making Spokane the Internet hub of a broader region--and much of the work has already been done.
NoaNet--Spokane's Third Unique Competitive Advantage
The GigaPop, which is under development and needs a home, will be our first competitive advantage. The Meet-Me Room will add to that advantage, positioning Spokane as the premier backup switching center for geologically unstable Seattle, Portland, and Vancouver, BC, capable of routing trans-Pacific traffic as well as regional traffic in the event of a catastrophe.
But Spokane has a third, unique competitive advantage. Spokane is at the center of a web of regional fiber-optic lines known as NoaNet. NoaNet brings gigabit capacity along BPA lines to rural communities throughout eastern Washington, northern Idaho, eastern Oregon, and western Montana. Relatively inexpensive extensions can interconnect with another two million Canadian users ranging from Hope on the slope of the Cascades to Medicine Hat in the Rockies, and north to Calgary and Edmonton.
NoaNet is perhaps the largest carrier-independent regional fiber network in the world. This fiber is basically empty, but can serve as a real-world proprietary testbed for any bandwidth-intensive purpose, like the downloading of movies over the Internet, telemedicine, distance learning, and research collaboration. Via NoaNet, even Sandpoint could grow a Google to add to its success with Coldwater Creek. This makes the Spokane region the most ideal location in the United States to develop, test, and roll out all these technologies of the future--if we maximize the potential of our central location in the NoaNet web.
NoaNet also makes possible virtual office buildings, allowing people to work as efficiently from home as from an office, expanding the pool of available workers, and bringing higher-income jobs to rural communities. Offshoring this kind of work has expenses that are often underreported, including the cost of building new, air-conditioned office space for sensitive electronic equipment in hot, humid climates; providing backup power to allow operation through frequent failures of the electric grid; and rapidly rising salaries for the still-limited number of well-educated employees. Although offshoring will still be somewhat cheaper, the ultimate cost difference is not as great as many believe, and the potential for disruption of service is greater. With a strong Internet infrastructure, our region can become and remain globally competitive from a strictly cost-centric perspective in the near and medium term.
Technology Showcase
In addition to providing world-class access and turning Spokane into a Tier One community, siting the GigaPoP and Meet-Me Room in the Phoenix Project will benefit regional businesses by allowing them to showcase their technologies in one location, cross-selling complete packages to visitors from around the world. For example:
- ReliOn's fuel cells can supply backup power.
- Genesis Fueltech and Innovatek fuel reformers can generate hydrogen from Avista natural gas for use by the fuel cells.
- Vivato switches located on the roof can expand the HotZone into the University District, the Gonzaga campus, and the Logan and East Central Neighborhoods.
- Purcell Systems cabinets can protect the communications gear.
- World Wide Packets can test applications of their gigabit Ethernet optical switches in an interface between eMAN fiber lines and Avista's end-user powerlines, potentially bringing gigabit access to every Avista customer without having to rewire their homes and offices.
- Itronix computers can demonstrate network testing capabilities and wireless applications.
- Itron meter reading equipment can demonstrate remote sensing and automatic wireless updating of information.
- Schweitzer Engineering Labs digital power-management technologies can oversee local power circuits.
- GamerZunion can both develop their technology for aggregating players of massively multi-user online games, and showcase their technology to visiting game companies, who might also take an interest in products or services from other businesses, like World Wide Packets and IT-Lifeline.
In addition to helping existing businesses, such a leading-edge digital infrastructure will make it possible for Spokane to be home to startups developing technologies of the future, such as femto-second pulse lasers that can transmit as many as 15,000 channels at 1GHz speeds per fiber, or digital distribution of movies for projection in theaters around the country.
Everything that has been discussed so far has been proven in other areas. The Westin Hotel in Seattle is home to the Pacific Northwest GigaPoP, where the University of Washington connects to the Internet. The Pittock Internet Hotel in Portland connects the Oregon universities to the Pacific Northwest GigaPoP as well as providing peer-to-peer connections for dozens of providers. Los Angeles is home to a building that, like the Phoenix Project, reinvigorated a depressed area through world-class fiber access. This example is discussed in detail below.
Success is infrastructure-dependent, and Spokane has infrastructure that would make many larger cities envious. The key is putting it all together.
Case Study: King Kong and the Fountain of Data
Wilshire Boulevard stretches west from downtown Los Angeles through an area called Koreatown, which became famous as a symbol of urban decay during the 1992 Rodney King riots. Once noted for its luxury apartment buildings and then for back-office skyscrapers, it had declined into a "modern high-rise ghost town." The rioters could have thrown rocks through most of the floors of a typical office building without hitting a thing. A fiber-optic loop laid optimistically during the 1980s to carry phone traffic appeared to be a big white elephant.
Then the World Wide Web arrived. Everything that seemed worthless turned the ghost town into a real-estate goldmine.
One Wilshire soared 30 mostly empty stories above downtown LA. Its biggest claim to fame was that, after the AT&T breakup, alternative long-distance provider MCI had brought its own fiber lines into the building and mounted a microwave transmitter on the roof pointed at Pacific Bell's central switching office 3000 feet away, where its calls could be linked into PacBell's network. This had encouraged other alternative telephone service providers to pull fiber into the building as well, expanding the menu of options for interconnections between users. The building was well situated when Internet use began exploding. The benefits began in One Wilshire and spread to all the buildings on the once-worthless fiber loop.
"As fiber technology grew in capacity, One Wilshire became not only a staging ground for connecting to the local system, it became a peer-to-peer connection point," says historian Kazys Varnelis. "In the fourth floor Meet Me Room, telcos are allowed to run interconnects directly between each other without charge. The result is a dramatic cost savings for the companies that results in the highest per-square-foot rents on the North American continent. Because space in the meet-me-room is at such a premium, telcos run conduit either to other floors of One Wilshire or to adjacent structures known as telecom hotels or telco hotels. Over a dozen nearby buildings now act as telco hotels, providing space to telephone and Internet companies seeking to be near the fountain of data at One Wilshire. Tenant-owned cooling units on the roof indicate the presence of telecoms: nobody trusts the building's owner to cool their equipment.
"The result, in Los Angeles, has been a local revival of the formerly moribund downtown real estate market. In the space of two years recently, one such building's occupancy rose from 30% to 91%. This has been somewhat controversial as a highly-publicized down side of these telco hotels is that circuitry and equipment do not demand a substantial employee presence. Nevertheless, there may be a benefit to this stealth occupation of the city. While they add to property values and hence tax rolls in the area, thereby allowing needed repairs to the hard infrastructure, telco hotels do not increase congestion on the streets. Moreover, Jack Kyser, the chief economist for the Los Angeles Economic Development Corporation suggests that access to this massive infrastructure will lead companies--especially multimedia entertainment companies--reliant on high-capacity digital networks to move in."
The Phoenix Project offers a way to bring the same kind of benefits to downtown Spokane and to all the underutilized buildings along our own mostly unused city-wide fiber-optic loop. The GigaPoP will allow world-class connections to the rest of the Internet, while the meet-me room will allow peer-to-peer interconnects without charge to providers. The resulting massive bandwidth and switching capacity will turn Spokane into a Tier 1 city on par digitally with places like Seattle and, of course, Los Angeles.
With this infrastructure in place and centrally located, a high-powered computer animation company could set up shop here and create graphics used in commercials or movies for customers around the world. After all, Peter Jackson did the same thing for remote New Zealand, where he developed all of the infrastructure necessary to create the Lord of the Rings trilogy and the current blockbuster, King Kong.
Likewise, other central neighborhoods like Logan and East Central can participate in the revival, just as Koreatown did in Los Angeles. Spokane's existing Metropolitan Area Network turns much of the city into valuable telecom-accessible property linked by the loop to the world-class connectivity in the Phoenix Project.
SOURCES:
Kazis Varnelis, "Towers of Concentration, Lines of Growth," lecture delivered at the Center for Land Use Interpretation, Los Angeles, 29 August 2002;
Progressive Policy Institute, "New Economy Index";
Eric Krapf, "Straightening Out the Internet Backbone," Business Communications Review, July 2001, pp. 14-15;
Presentation by Nan Chen, Director, Architecture Lab, Santa Clara, http://www.ieee802.org/3/10G_study/public/july99/chen_1_0799.pdf;
Presentation by F. Chang, University of Waterloo, Nov. 4, 1999, http://www.nortel-institute.uwaterloo.ca/pdfs/UWaterloo_OPTera_v1_1.PDF;
Red Herring, March 5, 2001;
Wall Street Journal.
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