San Leandro Fiber Is Lit

SAN LEANDRO, CA - Lit San Leandro, a fiber-to-the-business network being built by the software firm OSIsoft, made its first connection this week - to its parent company, OSIsoft. The fiber ring, whose first phase makes use of existing conduit owned by the city of San Leandro and the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) rail line, will eventually be able to serve businesses throughout this East Bay city.

OSIsoft reported on March 3:

We made the final lit fiber connection yesterday from our building in San Leandro to a data center in Oakland using leased BART fibers. This completes the Phase I of the Lit San Leandro fiber project. It provides OSIsoft:

(1) connectivity to the Internet at unheard-of speeds for a private company (10 Gbps now with 100 Gbps possible in a few months),

(2) [the ability] to relocate systems to our cage at the data center but allow them to operate on the same network as the systems in our building, lowering our load and protecting us against power outages (we currently have only 20 minutes of batteries but the data center has backup generators),

(3) ability to connect to any buildings on the loop for satellite offices that share the same network.

These are all important to OSIsoft, [whose employees] are heavy users of teleconferencing, IP-based phones and other digital tools.

The next step is to start contacting other current and potential businesses from San Leandro to ascertain what connections they require and what, if any, new laterals and splice points are needed as we begin to pull the rest of the 12-mile loop of fiber.

A half century ago, San Leandro had a strong economic base in manufacturing, but the most of its large factories have closed or downsized. The Lit San Leandro project is an effort to reinvent the city's economy by enabling the growth of knowledge-based industries.