The renovation of one of the world's largest office buildings began nine years ago in the basement, and one of three basement segments is finished. Work started in December on the first of five above-ground wedges, each of which will take about two years to complete. Kirsch called the old wiring there a rat's nest and said he expects subsequent wedges will go faster. Some power and network outages have occurred but nothing more serious, he said. In the first phase, copper use is confined to telephone service and to some data runs from wiring closets to desks.
Video arrives over a combination of fiber and coaxial cable.
Fiber and twisted-pair copper will run from the telecom closets to desks. Each telecom closet will support 100 users in about 10,000 square feet of floor space. Eventually, both secure and unsecured networks will ride on the same Sonet ring, and the two types of traffic will split at the telecom closets. In the first wedge, users have at least 10-Mbps Ethernet service plus some ATM to the desktop. By 2006, when the third wedge is done, every user will have 100 Mbps, mostly via ATM, Kirsch said.