The facility has several meet-me rooms on the 19th floor, which are used by telecommunication carriers and Internet service providers to cross-connect their individual networks. These carriers situate their POPs within racks spread throughout the building, connecting back to the meet-me room via fiber cabling, facilitating interconnection with other carriers’ infrastructure within the building. The Westin Building’s meet-me room is the heart of the facility, where buyers and sellers of broadband services offer interconnectivity to their backbones and diverse services without the need to utilize interconnections provided by telephone companies.

History

It was back in 1980 that four equal partners representing the distinct roles of landowner, builder, financier, and anchor tenant came together to build a 34-story office building just on the outskirts of Seattle’s central business district. On move-in day, 70 % of the building was leased: That included floors 4 through 15 for the Westin Hotels’ global Headquarters.

Later, the Westin Hotels’ global headquarters relocated elsewhere, but the name remained with the building. Their relocation and resulting vacancy were fortuitous, as several telecom companies in the west of the US wanted to install their equipment in the Westin Building next to GCI, Sprint, Western Telecom and meet them in the new 19th-floor meet-me room.

In 2013, The Westin Building was rebranded as the Westin Building Exchange. Now, with over two hundred telecom, Internet, and service provider companies located in the building, Westin has become a natural and desirable location for those industries that require hyperconnectivity as part of their service delivery requirement, such as gaming, video streaming, social networking and, as of late, a wide variety of cloud service providers. The cloud-based services model is now mainstream covering a wide variety of consumer options and extending well beyond the initial storage and compute entrées that birthed the cloud concept.

R&M USA and Westin Building Exchange

Since 2018, R&M products and solutions have served Westin Building Exchange IT infrastructure with the ability to provide cost-effective and customized offerings, high-quality products along top-notch technical and customer support services.

R&M provides fiber and copper connectivity products for colo clients and facility infrastructures with pre-terminated fiber patch panels, trunks, splice cartridges, connectors, cassettes, jumpers, copper cables, and connectivity. Westin appreciates R&M’s versatile and high-performance connectivity product lines, such as the 4RU universal housing having 288 high-density ports equipped with singlemode fiber LC/SC bulkheads, pre-terminated with ribbon pigtails, and customized trunks.

Like other hyperscale data center users, Westin needed a solution for over-crowded ducts and cable tray systems. R&M introduced the ribbon technology to help alleviate their congestion issues. Having ribbon-specific platforms and high-density connectivity solutions has given them a significant advantage over the competition.

Out of many features, the robust aluminum construction of R&M’s panels is very much appreciated by Westin’s technical staff. The dark fiber availability over R&M’s fiber and copper cables makes it a premier fiber and copper meet-me room.

R&M’s products and solutions will continue to be installed in Westin Building Exchange serving regional carriers including but not limited to AT&T, NTT America, Comcast, GTI Corporation, Level 3 Communications, XO Communications, Zayo Group, Integra Telecom, Verizon Business, Global Telecom & Technology, Alaska Communications, World Communications, Wave Broadband, BCE Nexxia and many more to land in the future.