Data centre operator
termcloudnetworking
Colocation, hosting and interconnection: the businesses that own the places where networks physically meet.
A property business with network effects, which is a stranger combination than it sounds. The value of a facility is not its floor space but who else is already inside it, because a cross-connect to a network in the same building is cheaper, faster and more reliable than reaching it any other way. That is why a small number of buildings carry a wildly disproportionate share of a region's traffic, and why an outage in one of them is a news event rather than a customer incident.
Also known as: colocation, colo, hosting, interconnection, carrier hotel