Lighting Up Internet Access

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.