Associated Press
Bush: Data hubs make state Internet gateway [Hi-Tech Jeb and Hi-Tech FL]
By Alex Veiga
MIAMI - During a visit to one of South Florida's two major data switching stations Monday, Gov. Jeb Bush celebrated what he said was the state's emerging status as a major gateway for Internet traffic from Latin America and Europe.
Bush toured the $200 million Network Access Point, or NAP, of the Americas, which has been open for nine months and serves as a data-routing point for Internet service providers and other telecom companies.
"For many years, Florida's gateway status has been defined by our seaports and our airports and our human resources that are from all over the world," Bush said. "Just as our gateway status in the real world is important, so too our gateway status in the virtual world is important."
NAPs function as central switching stations where information carried over one network can pass to another. Originally, there were four major NAPs in the United States: San Francisco, New York, Chicago and Washington.
"Florida already is a high-tech state, but now with the investment in the hundreds of millions of dollars in optical lines connecting through this network access point ... we will accelerate that growth," Bush said.
Miami-based Terremark Worldwide Inc. owns and operates the NAP of the Americas. Last week, the company announced a $5 million deal with the Comunidad Autonoma de Madrid to build scaled-down versions of the company's Miami network access point in Spain.
Terremark has 71 customers and has begun to run and upgrade a NAP in Sao Paulo, Brazil, said Terremark CEO and Chairman Manuel D. Medina.
"You have these major exchange points that are necessary in order to keep pace with the tremendous amounts of infrastructure," Medina said. "At the end of the day, it's more companies situating themselves here and more technology jobs created here."
Last June, Lt. Gov. Frank Brogan was on hand at the launch of another network access point, BellSouth Corp.'s Multimedia Internet Exchange, or MIX.
BellSouth was initially involved in discussions with the NAP of the Americas consortium, a group of more than 100 carriers that contracted Terremark to build the NAP. But BellSouth later decided to develop its own connection point.