One of Houston’s key telecom carrier hotels is changing hands according to an announcement today. Netrality Properties is acquiring 1301 Fannin Street, a 25-story, 1.1M square foot facility that currently houses 400K square feet of data center space and a dozen networks.
Netrality will be starting construction on a new carrier-neutral Meet Me Room, which is slated to be opened sometime this summer. They will also be working on plans to convert two more of the building’s floors to data center space, potentially adding some 100K square feet. If all this sounds familiar, it’s because it is.
Netrality only got its own name a few weeks ago, which is still recent enough that Google searches may try to redirect you to Net Neutrality rather than take you where you want to go. But the joint venture between industry icon Hunter Newby and Amerimar has been buying assets like this pretty regularly for a few years now. 1391 Fannin joins 325 Hudson in New York City, 401 North Broad in Philadelphia, 717 South Wells in Chicago, and 1102 Grand in Kansas City in its portfolio. In each case, they buy a key carrier hotel location outright and then remold it in the style Hunter Newby has perfected over the years as a key point of neutral interconnection.
One can easily imagine Netrality on the prowl for similar properties in other NFL cities around the country. They’ll probably do this a couple more times this year, assuming the opportunities to do so don’t dry up.
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Categories: Datacenter · Internet Traffic · Mergers and Acquisitions
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the message is clear…total building ownership, neutral agnostic management, and no monthly recurring cross connect charges…something you can plan with…
Lots of hurdles ahead. All of the carriers already have POP’s deployed here in specific suites. new MMR will still need to be granted access to those suites to connect to carriers. Might be a tough sell inside the building since there is already interconnection business in those spaces that want to protect revenue. Over the long term this will pan out and make the building easier to work in, but its going to take time.