Ken Papaleo © News Alf Gardner, president and CEO of Comfluent, stands with some of the equipment his company uses inside the Gas & Electric Building in downtown Denver. After the Telecommunications Act of 1996 changed the telecom landscape, the 96-year-old building became a dense data hub, stuffed full of servers, switches and cable.

By Jeff Smith, Rocky Mountain News
March 20, 2006

At Denver's "Carrier Hotel," only telecommunications companies check in.

Oh, there used to be plenty of other tenants in the former Denver Gas & Electric Building: engineering, insurance, property management, even a beauty salon.

But after the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the 96-year-old building at 910 15th St. underwent a dramatic transformation. The 1996 act, designed to promote local phone competition, enabled competitors to connect to Qwest's network and resell services.

As a result, the building became a hub for carriers, Internet service providers and other communications companies to interconnect their networks and house equipment.

With its location adjacent to Qwest's "Denver Main" central office, and AT&T's main downtown switching center, the building became a natural entry point into the region's local and long-distance networks. Today, a few dozen carriers or service providers, including MCI, Level 3, ICG Communications, XO and Time Warner Telecom, have presences in the building.

"Suddenly, it was telecom," said Gerald Armstrong, a Denver real estate investor and stockholder activist who was a building tenant from the late 1980s until a couple of years ago. He remembers working late at night and seeing young workers installing communications equipment like crazy.

"Suddenly the elevator was taken away because the shaft was going to be all fiber," Armstrong said.

Sometimes, the workers would borrow a cup of coffee or stop to chat. He talked to recent grads from Cal-Poly and the University of Virginia, who would soon be on their way to the next destination.

"They'd take the time to show you what they were doing," Armstrong said. "I had some good field trips out of it."

Alf Gardner had worked in the oil and gas industry for 15 years before starting a Web-hosting company called Comfluent in 1997.

He thought the Denver Gas & Electric Building, and Comfluent specifically, could become a hub for communications activity, similar to the way Henry Hub in Louisiana became an interconnection point for natural gas pipelines.

Today, Comfluent boasts the region's most extensive "meet- me room" - an industry term for the point where communications carriers and Internet service providers interconnect their networks.

Comfluent's facility connects to more than two dozen carriers and service providers in the area, including nearly all the major carriers.

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