Last week I noticed a link touting an "Exclusive Look at Facebook's Main Data Center" and clicked through, only to encounter photos of the building housing the Palo Alto Internet Exchange (PAIX). Apparently Facebook's mojo has made its presence the headline-grabber in any facility where it houses equipment. But veterans of the data center industry know that the PAIX, which is now operated by Switch and Data (SDXC), has a fabled history that predates the social networking boom.

In 1996 the PAIX facility was established as the first major carrier-neutral Internet exchange point, providing connectivity from multiple fiber providers. That bucked the trend at a time when most major exchange points were owned or controlled by telecom companies. The Palo Alto exchange was launched in the incubator labs of Digital Equipment, and its founders included Jay Adelson (who went on to found Equinix and Digg) and Paul Vixie (author of BIND and a key player in the DNS industry).

"The primary reasons the Palo Alto exchange existed was for interconnections," said Drew Leonard, a PAIX veteran who is now director product marketing for Switch and Data. "It wasn't a server farm. It was really customers who wanted access to the PAIX peering fabric."

That peering operation started in the basement, which quickly got crowded as demand for space grew. "We were putting people everywhere just to fit them in," Leonard recalled. The technical space was soon expanded to the first floor, and has since grown to encompass nearly the entire building.

HQ for Alta Vista
The PAIX site on Bryant Street was the first public school in Palo Alto, which is also home to Stanford University. The building eventually became part of Digital Equipment, and also served as the headquarters for DEC's Alta Vista when it was the top Internet search engine.

In 1999 the PAIX operation was bought by fiber provider Abovenet for $75 million, which set up a separate board to ensure the continued carrier neutrality of PAIX. Abovenet soon became Metromedia Fiber Network and expanded PAIX into a brand for carrier-neutral facilities in Atlanta, Dallas, New York, Seattle and Vienna, Va. in addition to the original Palo Alto site.

MFN wound up in Chapter 11 in 2002, and Switch and Data stepped forward to purchase the PAIX assets from the bankruptcy court for $40 million. The PAIX acquisition formed the nucleus of Switch and Data's interconnection business, which has since grown to more than 20,800 cross-connects generating $13.6 million in revenue in the fourth quarter of 2008.

More Colo Space Added
Switch and Data expanded the Palo Alto building in 2006. "We went through a seismic retrofit, there was a power upgrade, and we opened the second floor to colocation," said Leonard. "When we did that, it really opened up a new line of business. Today there's about 45,000 square feet of space."

The PAIX building still doesn't host high-density server farms, but houses equipment for nearly 100 providers exchanging network traffic. "It's all about optimizing traffic," said Leonard. "Palo Alto offers a unique opportunity as the primary peering point between Asia and the US. That's where the handoff between the Asian networks and US networks takes place."

And yes, that includes Facebook. Switch and Data doesn't identify its tenants, but peering records confirm that Facebook uses the Palo Alto facility as one of seven sites it uses to route global network traffic among its 150 million users - most of whom may not remember Alta Vista, but continue to experience the benefits of the carrier-neutral model.

David Pogue, personal technology writer for the New York Times posted this article yesterday with his thoughts on Google Voice and how it might change the industry. Post a comment and let us know you thoughts on how (or if) Google Voice will make an impact....

Original article here. 

One Number to Ring Them All

By DAVID POGUE

If Google search revolutionized the Web, and Gmail revolutionized free e-mail, then one thing’s for sure: Google Voice, unveiled Thursday, will revolutionize telephones.

It unifies your phone numbers, transcribes your voice mail, blocks telemarketers and elevates text messages to first-class communication citizens. And that’s just the warm-up. 

Google Voice began life in 2005 as something called GrandCentral. It was, in its own way, revolutionary.

It was intended to solve the headaches of having more than one phone number (home, work, cellphone and so on): Having to check multiple answering machines. Missing calls when people try to reach you on your cell when you’re at home (or the other way around). Sending around e-mail at work that says, “On Thursday from 5 to 8:30, I’ll be on my cell; for the rest of the weekend, call me at home.” And having to change phone numbers when you switched jobs or cities.

GrandCentral’s solution was to offer you a new, single, unified phone number, in an area code of your choice. Whenever somebody dialed your uni-number, all of your phones rang at once.

No longer did people have to track you down by dialing multiple numbers; no matter where you were, your uni-number found you. And all voice mail messages landed in a single voice mail box, on the Web. (You could also dial in to hear them as usual.)

On the Web, you could play back your messages or even download them as audio files to preserve for posterity. You could even ask to be notified of new voice mail by e-mail.

But wait, there was more. Each time you answered a call, while the caller was still hearing “one ringy-dingy, two ringy-dingies,” you heard a recording offering four ways to handle the call: “Press 1 to accept, 2 to send to voice mail, 3 to listen in on voice mail, or 4 to accept and record the call.” If you pressed 3, the call went directly to voice mail, but you could listen in. If you felt that the caller deserved your immediate attention, you could press * to pick up and join the call. This subtle feature saved time, conserved cellular minutes and, in certain cases, avoided a great deal of interpersonal conflict.

GrandCentral also let you record a different voice mail greeting for each person in your address book: “Hey, dollface, leave me a sweet nothing” for your love interest, “Hi, boss, I’m out making us both some money” for your employer.

You could also specify which phones would ring when certain people called. (For the really annoying people in your life, you could even tell GrandCentral to answer with the classic, three-tone “The number you have dialed is no longer in service” message.)

Also very cool: Any time during a call, you could press the * key to make all of your phones ring again, so that you could pick up on a different phone in midcall. If you were heading out the door, you could switch a landline call to your cellphone.

GrandCentral also offered telemarketing spam filters, off-hour call blocking (“never ring my BlackBerry on weekends”), and a dizzying number of other functions. For people with complicated lives, GrandCentral was a breath of fresh air. It felt like a secret power that nobody else had.

Then, in 2007, Google bought GrandCentral. It stopped accepting new members, ceased any visible work on it, and, apparently, forgot about it completely. The early adopters, several hundred thousand of them, were able to keep using GrandCentral’s features. But as time went on, their hearts sank. In January, Salon.com summed it up in an editorial called, “Will the Last One to Leave GrandCentral Please Turn Out the Lights?”

As it turns out, the joke was on them. Google was quietly working on GrandCentral all along. Starting Thursday, existing GrandCentral members can upgrade to Google Voice. In a few weeks, after debugging the system, Google will open the service to all.

Google Voice starts with a clean, redesigned Web site that looks like an in-box, à la Gmail. It maintains all of those original GrandCentral features — but more important, introduces four game-changing new ones.

FREE VOICE MAIL TRANSCRIPTIONS From now on, you don’t have to listen to your messages in order; you don’t have to listen to them at all. In seconds, these recordings are converted into typed text. They show up as e-mail messages or text messages on your cellphone.

This is huge. It means that you can search, sort, save, forward, copy and paste voice mail messages.

No human effort is involved; it’s all done with software. As a result, the transcriptions are rarely perfect. For one thing, Google’s software doesn’t seem to have discovered punctuation yet. (“ohh hi it’s michelle i just wanted to let you know that i really had fun last night and it’s really great to see you okay talk to you later bye bye.”)

There are errors, of course; it’s hard enough for people to understand cellphone conversations, let alone computers. Cleverly enough, the Web site displays transcribed words more faintly (light gray) when it is less confident about the transcription. Fortunately, it generally nails numbers — phone numbers, arrival times, addresses. And the rest is accurate enough to convey the gist.

Companies like PhoneTag, Callwave and Spinvox already transcribe voice mail, complete with punctuation. They’re great, but they cost money. Google Voice is free.

FREE CONFERENCE CALLING Never again will you pay for a conference call, or require a special dial-in number, or mess around with access codes. All you do is tell your friends to call your GrandCentral at the specified time — and boom, you can conference them in as they call you. No charge.

DIRT-CHEAP INTERNATIONAL CALLS If you dial your own Google Voice number from one of your phones, you’re offered an option to call overseas at rates even lower than Skype’s (and much lower than your cellphone company’s): 2 cents a minute to France or China, 3 cents to Chile or the Czech Republic. Sweet.

TEXT MESSAGE ORGANIZATION Google Voice’s last feature is its most profound. The old GrandCentral wasn’t great with text messages sent to your uni-number. In fact, it ignored them. They just disappeared.

Google Voice, however, does the right thing: it sends text messages to whichever cellphones you want — even multiple phones simultaneously.

Even more important, it collects them in your Web in-box just like e-mail. You can file them, search them and, for the first time in cellphone history, keep them. They don’t vanish forever once your cellphone gets full.

You can also reply to them with a click, either with a call or another text; your back-and-forths appear online as a conversation.

Google Voice eliminates some of the annoyances of its predecessor. You can, if you wish, turn off that “press 1, press 2” option, so when the phone rings, you can just pick it up and start talking. Google has also done some Googlish integration; for example, your Gmail and Google Voice address books are the same.

Nitpicks? Sure. The service has vastly beefed up its selection of available uni-numbers, but there are still some area codes you can’t get (212 is especially rare). As a side effect of Google Voice’s ring-all-phones-at-once technology, you sometimes find fragments of Google Voice error recordings on the answering machines of the phones you didn’t answer. (Solution: make your voice mail greeting at least 15 seconds long.) There’s a learning curve to all of this, too.

Still, you can’t imagine how much the game changes when you have a single phone number, voice mail transcriptions and nondeleting text messages on every phone. Suddenly, your communications are not only unified, but they’re unified everywhere at once — the cellphone, the Web and the e-mail program. And all of it free — even ad-free.

There may be some fallout as a result; I’d hate to be a company that sells voice mail transcription or conferencing calling services right about now. But that’s life, right? Every now and then, a little revolution is good for us.

E-mail: pogue@nytimes.com

 

 

Wanted to make sure everyone was up to speed on the ATT news.  Original article can be found here.

MARCH 10, 2009

 

Despite a capex cut of up to $3 billion this year, ATT Inc. (NYSE: T) made it clear today that it intends to spend to improve and expand its 3G network -- adding 3,000 jobs in the process to support "mobility, broadband, and video."

 

That's slight counterbalance to the 12,000 job cuts ATT announced in December. (See ATT to Cut 12,000 Jobs .) ATT acknowledged this in today's press release, saying it expected to continue cutting jobs in its wireline operations.

 

ATT reiterated that it's going to spend $17 billion to $18 billion this year. That's about even with its $17.7 billion in capital expenditures (capex) in 2007, but it represents a 10 to 15 percent cut from the $20.3 billion the carrier spent in 2008.

 

The capex figure is about what ATT predicted during its most recent earnings announcement.(See ATT Cuts Capex by up to $3B.)

 

ATT has said, though, that it expects to keep its international spending at around the 2008 level of $1 billion. 

 

ATT's plans for 2009 spending include a lot of 3G work -- no surprise, considering 3G was a big earner for ATT in 2008 with total wireless revenues up over 15 percent on 2007 to $49.3 billion. Much of this increase was driven by buoyant wireless data revenues and the continued success of the 3G iPhone

 

About two thirds of ATT's capex this year will go toward increasing network coverage. Specifically, the operator intends to expand 3G service to 20 new markets this year with more markets converting to 850 MHz for better indoor coverage. It already covers nearly 350 markets with its 3G network.

 

The network will get faster too: ATT intends to ramp up its high-speed packet access (HSPA) network to provide download speeds of 7.2 Mbit/s with "bursts" in the 20 Mbit/s range.

 

In the home, ATT wants to expand 3G coverage with tiny base stations, promising "customer trials leading toward general availability of ATT 3G MicroCell offerings, which utilize femtocells and home broadband connections to enhance in-building wireless coverage."

 

The firm also said that it will continue adding to its 20,000-plus network of WiFi hotspots in the U.S.

 

The press release quotes chairman and CEO Randall Stephenson saying data traffic on ATT's network is growing at 50 percent per year.

 

 

We thought this was an interesting entry from Glen Cathey's Boolean Black Belt blog (www.booleanblackbelt.com) on the topic of social network sites versus job boards......

I follow a number of recruiting blogs as well as many sourcers and recruiters on Twitter and I see a growing trend of job board bashing - typically comparing them (very) unfavorably to social networking sites and applications.

I love and leverage social networking as much as the the next recruiting professional, but I refuse to just blindly follow the crowd or jump on the bandwagon when it comes to anything. With all of the buzz about social media and so many people running away from and disparaging the job boards, I am going to step out of the crowd and try to figure out where this perspective that job boards = old/bad, social networking = new/good comes from, because to me, some of the reasoning doesn’t add up.

JOB BOARDS: JOB POSTING vs RESUME DATABASES

First, let me say that when I think of the job boards, I think of their resume databases - not job posting. Job posting is job posting - whether it’s on a paid job board, a free board, LinkedIn, Twitter, or Indeed.  While it can definitely work, it’s a passive and reactive technique that has a low ROI in most cases with many respondents who do not meet the basic qualificiations of the position posted.

I ACTUALLY USE BOTH JOB BOARDS AND SOCIAL NETWORKING

One thing I want to make clear is that I actually have access to and use major paid job board resume databases, and I also use LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. It is very important to realize that some people who speak negatively about the major job boards actually don’t use them. I am not really sure how someone can review or form an opinion of a product they don’t use. I’ll leave that for you to figure out.

EXCELLENT BLOG POST 

This well-presented post was brought to my attention via Twitter recently: Top 5 Reasons Why You Should Recruit Thru Social Networks, and I agree with most of the points made and reasons presented. However, because there is an undertone of job boards = old/bad and social networks = new/good, it offers a good platform to me to offer some counterpoints. 

POINT:

Social networks make it easy to build relationships with people who may not feel comfortble actively looking for a job online.

COUNTERPOINTS:

#1 The reality is that not all social networks make it EASY to build relationships with people. As I am fond of saying, if you can’t find or identify the people in the first place, you can’t establish a relationship with them. For example, if you’re on Facebook looking for potential employees - Facebook’s search interface is limited and you can only see information about people inside your network. Even third party Facebook search applications that do allow you to see information about people beyond your network and don’t really offer very effective or powerful people-finding ability. 

The search interfaces/engines of all major online job board resume databases enable users to create highly specific searches and thus easily return relevant results. If you can find them, you can contact them and begin to build relationships with them.

#2 Even after you’ve found someone on a social network, there is nothing inherently easier about building relationships with people you find via social networks than sending an email or picking up the phone to reach people you’ve found on a job board (or the Internet, or wherever). Think about it.

Besides, once you find someone on a job board, you could just as easily cross reference their name and search for them on social networks and reach out to them there as well. For Facebook specifically, this is especially helpful because you actually have a name to search with, and in many cases a company.

Careerbuilder is already making the move to capitalize on cross referencing people who post their resume on their site with social networks with their new Applicant Explorer. I’ve used it - it’s cool, and it works.

#3 Some people who don’t feel comfortable actively looking for jobs online do actually post their resumes confidentially on the major job boards, with no identifying information - but they can be found and contacted. In fact, some of the best candidates are completely confidential. If your information is on LinkedIn, Twitter, MySpace or Facebook - it’s not confidential.

You should know that some people who post their resumes online aren’t actually actively looking. You may also find it interesting to know that my own research has shown that approximately 75% - 80% of the resumes on the major online job boards have posted dates over 30 days old. It could be argued the job board resume databases are actually more “passive channel” than “active channel.” 

If you do have access to any major job board resume database and you’re only searching for people who just posted their resume (and thus “active” candidates, at least in theory), you’re missing the vast majority of candidates, and you are falling prey to the #7 misake out of 15 that sourcers and recruiters make.

POINT: 

You can easily find relevant candidates for any position by searching for candidates with the skills your company is looking for.

COUNTERPOINTS:

#1 See counterpoint #1 above. No social network has a very advanced search interface or capability, and some are quite poor, so for the most part you actually can’t easily find relevant candidates. LinkedIn’s search interface and capability is solid and is perhaps the best of the social media bunch, but it still does not compare well to the search interfaces and capability of any of the major job board resume databases in terms of configurability, control and precision. 

#2 You actually CAN search job board resume databases and easily find relevant candidates with the skills your company is looking for. More easily than you can with any social network/application.

POINT: 

When you recruit in social networks your company will reap the added benefit of spreading brand awareness and increasing the desire of others to work at your company.

COUNTERPOINT:

When you find candidates via the job boards, I think you have just as much opportunity to brand yourself and your company when you contact the people you find and spread brand awareness through them.

However, there is no denying that having a corporate presence on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or other social networking sites, or having a corporate blog can increase your brand awareness and the desire of others to work at your company in ways that the major job boards simply cannot, as they do not offer similar methods of exposure or branding. 

POINT:

One of the most popular ways to find a potential candidate is through connections. When you begin recruiting in social networks you expand your personal network so that you can reach a much larger number of potential candidates.

COUNTERPOINT:

Job board resume databases can be used in a manner very similar to social network sites and applications. If you’re using a resume database and you’re not actively and consistently building relationships with, networking with, branding yourself/your company, and referral recruiting with the people you’re contacting then you are most certainly not leveraging job board resume databases to their fullest potential.

Since before the Internet and even the computer, any good recruiter knows success is about establishing and building relationships and expanding your personal and professional network - every person you come into contact with knows other people.  You don’t need a social networking site to leverage this simple fact - just pick up the phone. 

Some people may be surprised to learn that the concept of social networks is over 100 years old. MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn are examples of social network services, but social networking does not require the Internet.

POINT:

Job boards are on the way out and more and more employers are turning to social networks for recruitment.

COUNTERPOINT:

There is no denying that more and more employers are turning to social networks for recruitment and that traffic to the major job boards has been declining, but I am not exactly sure if job boards are on their way out. While they are not likely to completely disappear, they do need to (and likely will, in order to survive) evolve their identity and functionality in order to play catch-up with the positive buzz and valuable features of social networking sites and applications.  

A FEW POINTS OF MY OWN

And now I would like to raise a few points of my own regarding the job boards in comparison to social media:

POINT: 

It is certainly a fact that everyone is not on a job board. There are people you can find and recruit via social media that you simply cannot find on a job board.

However, the converse is also true - everyone is not on a social network, and there ARE actually great people you can find on the job boards that you simply cannot find on any social network. If you don’t agree with this point and don’t use job board resume databases, you’re certainly entitled to your opinion, but it won’t be supported by fact. 

POINT: 

Job boards cost money. Social networks are free (for the most part - you can pay for LinkedIn). While everyone loves free - free means everyone (530,000 recruiters!) has access and therefore there is no competitive advantage of exclusivity. Sometimes you do get what you pay for.

If you’re in executive search and working with clients who are very savvy with social media and who leverage Linkedin heavily and effectively, don’t be surprised to hear your clients eventually say something like this: “Don’t bother searching LinkedIn - we already have that covered, and we won’t pay a fee for candidates on LinkedIn.”  You heard it predicted here first.

CONCLUSION:

I completely agree that social networks are an amazing channel for finding potential employees and that they are increasingly becoming an even expected way of finding them. Companies should definitely be leveraging social networking via blogs, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, etc. I agree that if they don’t, they risk “being left in the dust,” as having an effective social media strategy can likely be a significant competitive advantage.

However, I strongly feel that having an either/or mentality when it comes to social media and the job boards is illogical - it just doesn’t make sense.  Everyone is entitled to their opinion, but I sincerely hope people think before they simply jump on the bandwagon.