Lighting up Internet access: GoodNet wires plug-and-go buildings

Three office buildings in Manhattan's high-tech Silicon Alley and two in Phoenix provide tenants instant, high-speed access to the Internet with no busy signals or local loop charges. Three more in New York are being wired, and one in Scottsdale, Ariz., will be ready in 1998.

Installing this sort of Internet plumbing is part of a concept called "lit buildings" being pioneered by GoodNet Corp., a Phoenix-based national Internet service provider that acts as a wholesaler of dedicated high-speed Internet connectivity to businesses. Each building becomes its own local area network with branches to the offices inside, which are tied together through GoodNet's OC-3 (155 Mb/s) asynchronous transfer mode backbone.

The latest to be wired up is Trump Tower in mid-town Manhattan, where GoodNet, XS Bandwidth and FreeLinQ Communications demonstrated high-speed Internet service and video-on-demand. By the end of October, 1000 apartments in the tower are slated to be on-line.

GoodNet moves its points of presence, including ATM switches and routers, into the buildings' basements and telco rooms, said Darin Wayrynen, the ISP's chief technology officer.

Each building requires a unique solution, and GoodNet can offer point-to-point frame relay or ATM access, as well as T-1 service, Ethernet or digital subscriber line technologies. The ISP's customers get the same limited protection they would get from any other Internet connection, so they have to work with a systems integrator to get firewall services.

The lit building concept sharply reduces the common 60- to 90-day wait and numerous phone calls that companies endure when they contract separately to get their individual offices wired, said Abhishek Gami, vice president of Nesbitt Burns Securities Inc., Chicago.