Xeni Covers One Wilshire

By Eric Richardson
Published: Tuesday, February 20, 2007, at 11:06AM

Eric Richardson [Flickr]

DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES — Xeni Jardin filed an NPR piece yesterday on the One Wilshire Building, the inconspicuous looking hub for west coast telecommunications. The building started its life housing law offices, but today anchors a telecommunications district that many Downtown might not know about.

Downtown has maybe a dozen buildings dedicated to data and connectivity, all within the financial district. All connect back to One Wilshire, often with multiple paths of fiber running under different streets for redundancy.

A little over a decade ago there was actually concern that Downtown's real estate market would be completely taken over by machines. Telecom companies were coming in and paying great rates for space, but they were employing lots of servers and very few people. Downtown was in danger of becoming a fully-leased ghost town. While the telecom market still seems strong, I think the danger of it overriding Downtown has passed.

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Comments

Whitman Lam writes:

Careful... such information might be used by terrorists. They might attack our national server networks to disrupt our telecom and logistics. But I guess it's public information already anyway... but still.

# on Feb.20.2007 AT 11:19 PM

Kenarch writes:

Hmmm. I was going to make a comment about how glad I am that I don't live next to One Wilshire because now it is probably a far more attractive target than it ever was... and I saw Whitman beat me to it... Then I thought... Naaah - don't be so negative... but it's a sign o' the times I suppose.

Which brings up an interesting question: I wonder if that building has a higher level of security than an "ordinary office building"?

I see Eric was careful to say that the connecting runs in the streets have redundancy built-in... but it does beg the question about how well protected assets like this really are.

A very interesting story. I walk past that building pretty often, and it never occured to me that it was anything other than a very quiet office building.

# on Feb.21.2007 AT 12:13 AM

Scott Mercer writes:

How many terrorist attacks on this country have we had since 9-11-2001? Does the word ZERO mean anything to you?

Not saying we will never have another terrorist attack on American soil. We sure will. It's a huge country, and time is forever. Not saying we should forget all about it either. We should be aware of our surroundings.

It just seems to me that Americans have only two switches on them: Completely Oblivious and Paniced Frenzy. Can't we find a middle ground?

# on Feb.21.2007 AT 04:01 AM

Kenarch writes:

Scott...!

Does over three thousand Americans in uniform dead in Iraq mean anything to you?

Not saying that the Iraq war has had any effect on the fact that there have not been any further terrorist attacks here, but come on... this isn't paranoia or panic. It's simply a few thoughts that came to mind about publicly profiling a building that houses some rather juicy stuff.

Also - nearly three thousand died in NY, DC and PA - that is more than all the other extra-Middle East terrorist attacks of the past twenty years added together. We might be forgiven for being just a little concerned...

# on Feb.21.2007 AT 10:37 AM

dan in LA writes:

back to the building...

is this the building with the UNBELIEVABLY LOUD fans on the west side. the other day i was wondering if that was for cooling, or power generation. now it makes a little more sense.

# on Feb.21.2007 AT 12:04 PM