One of the many, many things we’re excited about is the kick-ass network we’re going to have at LaunchPad Coworking. Apparently some very forward thinking people decided to cover downtown Austin with fiber-optic cable back in the 70s. Since then much of it has been sliced and diced, but a little sleuthing on the part of Carl De Cordova, our IT guru, revealed that 800 Brazos is fiber-ready.
We’re going to start with a 10 Mbit connection — both upstream and downstream. This is wired connectivity — everyone on the coworking side of LaunchPad will have their own network connection, and all the meeting rooms will have one or more connections. You’ll also have powered ethernet connections, which means you can easily hook up a VOIP phone to any workspace.
This is some serious speed. You can upload your HD video all day long if you’d like, and it won’t slow things down a bit :) And if necessary, we can up that speed to as high as 100 Mbits on very short notice. We can even do that for just a day or two at a time!
And of course there will be wifi everywhere too. Not just your run of the mill coffee shop wireless, either. Even the free wifi in the cafe will be way better than we’re used too, because we’re installing 4 commercial grade points of presence.
The details:
- Cisco 2821 router — a mid-level enterprise router
- Catalyst Active gigabit ethernet switches (aka 1000BaseT)
- Cat 6 cabling to support power over ethernet — all home runs
- Cisco 2106 Wifi controller with 4 PoP antennas — this lets us shape the wifi for maximum performance.
- Cisco ASA5500 firewall
- Cisco Metro ethernet 3400 — to handle the fiber to ethernet handoff from Time Warner Business Class.
- 2 Apple XServes
Needless to say, we will be incredibly fast and reliable :)
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5 responses so far ↓
1 mandi // May 13, 2008 at 6:07 pm
Wow!! You aren’t messing around :)
Thanks for listing all of the specific hardware… I can’t wait to see the place, the drawings and descriptions sound fabulous.
2 Julie Gomoll // May 13, 2008 at 8:05 pm
Thanks, Mandi. I’m sure some day this kind of connectivity will seem ho-hum, but it’s not yet. Thinking about some of the wacky possibilities with a 100Mbit connection can be very distracting…
3 Jacob Sayles // May 13, 2008 at 10:06 pm
We don’t have fiber but we do have a very short line of sight to the Weston where all the NW traffic travels through. We got a 10Mbit Wifi loop and so far we have been very pleased. We started out with a T1 from Speakeasy and were very disappointed. Nice to hear about your setup. If I’m ever down in Austin again I’ll be excited to test out your tubes.
4 Ian Ragsdale // May 22, 2008 at 12:45 pm
This does sound pretty awesome. I actually live in this building, and I had no idea we had access to fiber.
Something I’d like to bring up with our HOA is getting a shared network connection for our building, so that each resident doesn’t have to pay $40-$50 for our own net connection, and so that we don’t each have to set up our own wi-fi.
I have something like 22 networks visible to me from my apartment, they all interfere with each other, and it’s only going to get worse. Does anybody have Carl’s contact info? I’d like to discuss getting a cost estimate done to set up wireless for the building.
If we got whole-building access set up, maybe we could work with Coworking to buy in greater bulk & bring costs down.
5 Julie Gomoll // May 24, 2008 at 5:16 pm
Hi Ian -
You’re right, the whole building should have access to the fiber. Unfortunately that’s not something we can really drive, as we only have access to the 4200 square feet we’re renting.
FYI, I know the Mexican Consulate on the 3rd floor also uses fiber. Not sure about the other offices in the building.
If your tenant rep is interested in doing something building-wide, we’d happily participate. I think the direction to go is not through us, but to get building management to work with Time Warner directly.
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