St. Paul Pioneer Press
DataBank plans Eagan site, with $50 million upgrade
Eagan's push to attract a telecommunications and data-storage center has paid off. DataBank, which operates data co-location facilities in Edina, Dallas and Kansas City (MO), plans to turn the former 88,000-square-foot Taystee Foods building into a data center to serve the region.
The company estimates it will spend about $9 million in site and building improvements and almost $40 million more in equipment costs. The center will work as a sort of data hotel, giving companies space to deploy their servers and equipment. Likely tenants would be telecommunications providers, as well as companies that are seeking a regulatory compliant space in the energy, financial, health care and managed service industries, DataBank spokesman Aaron Alwell said.
Eagan was attractive to DataBank because of the diverse power grid from Dakota Electric and Great River Energy, as well as the city's high-capacity, fiber-optic network that boasts a number of tier-one carriers already interconnected, Alwell said.
Minnesota-wide broadband goal unlikely to be met by 2015
Though slow in coming, access to high-speed Internet around the state of Minnesota is on the rise. This includes wired access with physical connections via copper, coaxial or fiber-optic technologies, and wireless from cellular operators AT&T and Verizon.
Wireless, though, usually complements and does not replace physical access for most consumers because of caps on data usage. Verizon Wireless, Minnesota's wireless-Internet leader, has blanketed most of the state with high-speed service.
Rival AT&T is hot on Verizon's heels, offering rapidly expanding wireless-data service of its own. This means most outstate Minnesotans, if they have AT&T or Verizon, have Internet-access speeds that would have seemed like science fiction a decade ago -- provided they're willing to access their carrier's data plan.