Lit San Leandro is putting fiber in the ground. A launch party attracted about a hundred out-of-town development prospects and local business people who heard about the project’s big picture benefits and the specific real estate opportunities it creates. The Hayward Daily Review and San Leandro Patch have good articles on the event. Patrick Kennedy’s Lit San Leandro blog also has good updates and pictures.
Speakers at the event included Sean Tario, the CEO of Open Spectrum Inc., a data center consultancy, Jeremy Neuner, the founder of NextSpace and Justin Reilly, a partner at Cassidy Turley commercial real estate.
This makes three Bay Area cities with municipal dark fiber networks: Palo Alto, Santa Clara and San Leandro. Palo Alto’s is a 41 mile network with about 60 primary customers, and many more secondary users buying lit service from the primaries. Santa Clara has 57 miles of dark fiber, a couple dozen primary customers (the biggest group being major data centers) and many more secondary users.
Lit San Leandro is a private venture with full City backing to build an 11-mile dark fiber loop through commercial and industrial districts. The City is contributing conduit access for 99%-plus of the route. Patrick Kennedy, a local entrepreneur and owner of OSI Soft, a major local software company, is installing the fiber and will run the system on a cooperative basis.
An interconnect to BART’s fiber network is already operational, and several other metro and long haul fiber networks either cross or are within easy reach of the Lit San Leandro system. Low cost, high capacity connections to Tier 1 Internet facilities combined with a large inventory of industrial and commercial properties is expected to attract data centers and other high technology, broadband-intensive businesses.
Tellus Venture Associates advised the City of San Leandro on the project and handled contract negotiations with OSI Soft. The City of Palo Alto is also one of our clients. More information on Lit San Leandro (including contracts), Palo Alto and others is here.