This is the fourth article in a series of interviews with Eric Bender, President of Wilshire Connection (WilCon), the largest independent telecom carrier in Los Angeles. In this segment Eric discusses the future of WilCon, including expansion outside of Los Angeles, wireless topics, relations with local utilities, and some great examples of WilCon's flexibility in delivering telecom solutions to the LA community.

Pacific Tier: Outside of downtown LA , what is your expansion strategy for going to place like El Segundo, Las Vegas, or other cities, parts of the city?

Eric Bender: We've leased dark fiber from other carriers to get to other off-net locations such as El Segundo. We connect Equinix on Maple, so we can do lit transport into that facility. We're working on a plan that would extend from there to the 365 Main location in El Segundo, and then with a second route back to downtown.

This is the second part of an interview with Eric Bender, President of Wilshire Connection. In this segment Eric talks about the period in 2000 preceding the Democratic Nation Convention, and the aggressive industry build out of conduit, fiber, and telecommunications infrastructure in the downtown Los Angeles area.

Pacific Tier: At what point do you think the city of Los Angeles figured out this would be a really good thing for LA, and it would bring more business and money into downtown?

Eric Bender: I don't think they ever came to that conclusion. What happened was in 2000 the Democratic Convention was going to be down at the Staples Center in downtown, so I think it was in early 2000 or at the very end of 1999 the city called a meeting and notified all the telecom carrier that had been active or building or doing things that as a part of the preparations for the convention that they would be repaving the streets, resurfacing certain streets, and there was going to be an absolute five year moratorium on any digging or street construction work as a result of this. They wanted the streets to look pretty on TV, and that was fine.

Downtown Los Angeles is among the most densely connected telecommunication hubs in the world. A dozen buildings in LA's city center house the world's largest Internet networks, telecommunication carriers, content management networks, and entertainment companies - interconnected through a complex mesh of submarine fiber optic cables, terrestrial cables, and internet exchange points.

With more than 500 networks and carriers operating within the LA city center, one company stands out from the crowd as a leader in bringing the global telecommunications and Internet community together. Eric Bender is president of Wilshire Connection, a facility-based carrier focusing on providing neutral, high capacity fiber optic cable interconnecting the most important buildings in Los Angeles.

Wilshire Connection (WilCon) has a vision to free the LA telecom and Internet-enabled community from the burden of developing a highly meshed inter-building infrastructure, allowing each company to focus on bringing value to their global network interconnections and relationships. Eric Bender, President of Wilshire Connection, is the man behind WilCon's dramatic success in wiring Los Angeles.

August 18th, 2009. Los Angeles, California, USA

Around 2:30 p.m. This afternoon I needed to make the drive from Long Beach (California) to Burbank (California). Normally this is not a bad drive, as the mountains are a pleasure to see off in the distance, and if you take the long way around (US Interstate 605 from Long Beach to the mountains, then follow the I 210 freeway around towards Burbank), particularly in the winter months, it is a clear, beautiful panorama of the LA Basin skyline.

Not today. A combination of smoke drifting into the LA area from fires near Santa Barbara, and weather conditions holding the smog in the LA Basin have created a condition that is, well downright disgusting. In Long beach we have the advantage of good breeze coming off the ocean which keeps the coastline generally clear, and not too unhealthy.