When an affiliate of Amerimar Enterprises bought 401 N.
Broad St. in the spring of 2014, the new owners knew they had a lot of work to
do at the massive building.
“We needed to put Humpty Dumpty back together again,”
said Gerald M. Marshall, president and chief executive officer of Netrality
Properties, which is a division of Amerimar and involves Hunter Newby, a
telecom industry veteran. “We needed to put those pieces together so that we
were comfortable spending capital. We wanted a clear path to put Humpty Dumpty
back together again. It was not a no brainer and without risk.”
The budget was $70 million and inroads have been made in
the last year. So far, $55 million has been spent to make the figurative
nursery rhyme character whole again.
Some of the work involved buying a couple of adjacent
properties. For example, Marhshall and his team bought a sliver of land for $4
million from local developer Bart Blatstein and it purchased another property
for $9.8 million from the Gerald S. Kaufman Corp.
But the bulk of the work was needed on the inside of the
11-story, 1.3-million-square-foot property that Phil Calantoni, director of
business development at 401 Broad, called one of the best known buildings in
the telecom industry. In fact, to look at the building belies what is going on
inside.
The property is considered the most fiber-dense,
network-neutral facility between New York and Virginia. The building is a
significant center for data and internet traffic and offers data center
infrastructure for carriers and service providers. One of the main
characteristics that attracts telecom companies to the building is its
location, which gives it the ability to tap into so-called long-haul fiber in
the region that provides access to fiber routes to Europe.
“The address is famous,” Calantoni said, adding: “What
we’re doing is game changing.”
One of the most significant improvements that was made is
not something that appears to be all that big but actually is. It is a
20,000-square-foot “Meet-Me-Room,” or MMR. It’s a space within a telecom hotel
where different networks can come together and connect. In the case of 401 N.
Broad, it is a carrier neutral room and will be owned and controlled by Netrality.
There is another benefit to that since Netrality doesn’t
charge its tenants, such as Comcast Corp., AT&T, RCN, Verizon, TeliaSonera
and others for cross connections. Other similar data centers charge a monthly
fee for this service and that, on average, can be as high as $370 a month.
“Not charging,”
Marshall said. “It’s huge.”
Netrality's revenue model is to charge for power and
space and create a safe and secure environment for network operators, Marshall
said. The real estate company doesn’t charge for fiber connections between
customers and it doesn’t compete with its customers.
“In fact, we play the role of matchmaker between
customers via our directors of business development and our online
marketplace,” Marshall said.
“That way we’re not stepping on the toes of our
customers,” Calantoni said. “From a real estate perspective, we are truly
neutral and that’s what carriers need. They need us to facilitate
interconnection.”
Money was also spent renovating the lobby to not only
serve as a nice first impression for prospective customers but also to put in
more security. Work was done to upgrade so-called point of entries where fiber
optic cables enter the building and splice rooms, where cables get cut and
redistributed. Those rooms were made to be climate controlled.
Other infrastructure, such as tracking and unused
elevator shafts, were improved since they are used to house cable. Several
cooling towers, key to keeping things from overheating, were also installed.
The owners also gutted a garage and created more parking as well as room to
house a dozen back-up generators. The facility can’t go down for a minute.
“This is a super important building for the United States
that needed to be taken to the next level,” Marshall said.
About 300,000 square feet remains vacant and that will
eventually be built out.
Source: Philadelphia
Business Journal
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