Specifications

12 ExtroNews 12.2 March/April 2001
UNIQUE TECHNIQUES
AT&T’s GNOC sits on a 200 acre campus
an hour’s drive from New York City. The
operations center links 30 major
metropolitan areas nationwide, serving
roughly 80 million customers. The building,
with its technology-infused infrastructure
and unique architectural design, has few
precedents. It covers four floors, two above
ground and two below, for a total of
198,000 square feet of space.
Designing the Facility
Plans for the center were in the works for
two years before ground was broken on the
project. AT&T’s objective for building the
operations center was driving every design
aspect for the facility from the get-go. The
building itself would serve several different
purposes. In addition to being the nerve
center of AT&T’s domestic communications
network, the facility would also be
something of an ambassador for AT&T. The
GNOC would be a place where AT&T could
bring customers to experience first-hand
what the company does. It would also
provide a site to demo new products and
launch new programs. Making the building
“future proof” had a couple of different
meanings from a design perspective. One,
the data infrastructure had to be capable of
handling as efficiently as possible any type or
volume of traffic customers could generate.
And two, because of the building’s
ambassador status, its physical design had to
be on the bleeding edge of communications
technology.
The end result is the GNOC plays three
roles: it’s a world-class command and control
center; it hosts an elaborate visitors’
program; and it supports a well-equipped
corporate briefing center. To conceptualize
and design the telecomm and A/V solutions
needed for this extensive project, AT&T
“Future Proofing” AT&T with A/V
I
n January of 1998, AT&T announced plans to build a state-of-the-art
Global Network Operations Center (GNOC) in Bedminster, New Jersey.
The international communications company stated that its objective for
building the new facility was to “future proof” its network. Less than
twenty-one months after ground was broken and at a cost of
$91 million, that objective was met when the doors opened on the
world-class command and control center.
Image 1. The Operations Theater is the hub of AT&T’s
Global Network Operations Center in Bedminster, NJ.
Extron SS 200 (Sync Stabilizer)
“Using the SS 200s let
Shen Milsom & Wilke
deliver a more cost-
effective systems design to
our client,” says Emspak.