 Welcome to JSA TV and JSA Podcasts, the newsroom for telecom and data center professionals. I'm Jamie Scott of Kataya, coming to you from Virtual Metro Connect 2021. Joining me today is my good friend, Greg Elliott. He is the vice president of business development at 1623 Barnum. Greg, welcome to JSA TV. Thanks, Jamie. Great to see you again. Great to see you. It's been a little bit. Hope this year and last isn't been too difficult for you, my friend. All good. All good. Considering. Yeah, considering, right? So for those of our viewers who are not familiar yet with 1623 Barnum, can you give us a brief overview? Sure, yeah. So 1623 Barnum is the carrier hotel, de facto carrier hotel for Omaha. And we've been over the last couple of years, the ownership's been putting about $45 million into the building. So now, in addition to being the carrier hotel, it'll be a cutting edge data center with new power infrastructure, cooling infrastructure. We have nine floors, eight megawatts of capacity and already has 50 carriers. And so that's awesome and coupled with the hyperscaler activity in the area. It's just a great spot to be at. Well, you're saying all the right things for our viewers, I'm sure, phenomenal funding and upgrades. We've got carriers, we've got OTTs. So tell us a little bit more about this interconnect ecosystem that you're creating within 1623 Barnum in the surrounding region. Yeah, so as I mentioned, Berks Group owns the whole building. And so we have control of the facility. We have the building owned carrier neutral meet me room on the third floor, where that's obviously the heart and soul of the building. And so we have 50 plus carriers and we're continually every day creating a more and more fertile ecosystem for those carriers, for our content providers, for our enterprise customers to have the more networks they have to connect with, the more flexibility it gives to our customers. And so we do that daily, talking to existing customer, asking them if there's other networks that they wanna connect to what it looks like for on the horizon to do that. So we're having those conversations, making those physical connections and making all that happen. We also have the Omaha IX, which is growing at a rapid pace. We have eyeball networks joining, it seems like weekly and content providers joining as well. We just had a couple that took down 100 gig ports. And so we just see growth there. And then we've added a mega port to the facility. They put in a redundant configuration, dual router dual switches, which is a little, they don't do that everywhere. So we're fortunate to have that deployment. And then tell our friends, tell you they're turning up a new fiber route from Chicago through Des Moines, through Omaha, through us, and then onto Denver. So just seeing a lot of new activity and new fiber growth and it's all good. Absolutely exciting news is that robust marketplace you've got going on Omaha IX, folks like mega port and Telia, good folks in general, but killer networks and capabilities. So why Omaha? What is so interesting about the latency scenario you're cooking up there? Yeah, it's a simple location, location, location. So you look at the map, Omaha is almost right in the center of the US, good spot in North America. And for years, fiber routes have ran north, south, east, west and have come through the building. But then you couple on the growth of the hyperscalers and council bluffs in Omaha, Google has one of their main North American data centers close to us, less than a millisecond away, around a millisecond, Facebook's closed, Apple's over in Des Moines. And so you have all that activity going on. And so we work with our carriers proactively to figure out, look at other data center markets both in the Midwest on the coast, up in Canada and down south. And so we're actively keeping track of those round-trip latencies that can be found on our website that people can check out. So if you find you're a carrier and you have better latencies to different markets, let us know and we can update the table. Well, I gotta say from a personal perspective, we love telling your story. We love promoting your news because you guys are just such a success story. You've got the nuts and bolts, the great data center specs and meeting room specs and you're attracting all the right folks to your space. Plus like you said, location, location, location, it's you're brewing the perfect storm, which we love. So that begs the question, what is on the horizon for 1623? What is 2021 and beyond look like? Yeah, so we have all those ingredients and things are happening, we recognize that technology doesn't stand still. So we're, we love to push the envelope as far as different events and things that we're working on. So we're just announced and in March, there's an augmented reality challenge that's going to be happening in Omaha, between Omaha and Kansas City. So that'll be cool, the community ideation on different issues and then solve those issues with augmented and maybe virtual reality. And then we'll do some hackathons. So there'll be some cash prizes available. So that'll be fun. And then we're also working on a 5G lab in the facility, a carrier neutral 5G lab for software and hardware providers to test out what they're working on across multiple 5G providers. So that's an initiative that we're working on as well. And then just wrapping up the building improvements and having all that come online is super exciting. And then just continuing to build the ecosystem. So a lot of fun stuff going on. So fun, so innovative, AR challenge, the 5G lab. And I feel like it's a, they're great methods to also attract the younger generation into how cool our data center world is, you know? Which we need. So I just, I love where you guys are heading with this. It's such a great story. We're looking forward to further news from you guys throughout the year. Thank you so much for joining us. Tell me, what can our viewers go to learn more information? Sure. So our website, our great website that JSA helped us with. It's amazing, 1623farnum.com where you can reach out to me directly if, you know, to discuss 1623 or if you're looking at a Midwest deployment. We've been here for a long time and we know a lot of the fiber routes and different, you know, other network options. So happy to help however we can. And yes, viewers, remember that address, 1623farnum.com a site to check out. Thank you, Greg for joining us and for your time here today. And thank you viewers for tuning in to JSA TV and JSA podcasts. Happy networking.