Florida Trend - September 21, 2001
By MARK HOWARD

My brother-in-law is a gifted musician and composer. Listening to music with him is always a more-than-usual pleasure because he hears elements — a bass line, a rhythm part, a secondary instrument — that are simply inaudible to me. Better, he is articulate enough to both point them out and explain how they’re integral in making the overall song or composition work.
Talking with Benjamin Finzi about high-tech in Florida offers a similar mix of pleasure and enlightenment. Finzi is the chief operating officer of Epik Communications, a fiber-optic telecom company that’s a subsidiary of Florida East Coast Industries. Finzi, a native of Italy, has lived in Israel, France and New York. A quiet, unassuming man with a gentle voice that tends to deflect credit, Finzi speaks several languages with an elegance and command most of us wish we had in our native tongues.

Finzi is important because he is the driving force behind the creation of the NAP of the Americas in Miami, which functions as a major hub for the international traffic in voice, data and video that constitutes business communication today. Amid all the hype about making Florida high-tech, the NAP may do more than any other single development to put Florida on the technological map in the next decade.

A NAP (network access point) is a facility to which big communications carriers like Epik, AOL/Time Warner, Deutsche Telekom and Global Crossing route traffic and hand it off to each other to get it where it needs to go in the most efficient way. Each company maintains a room full of proprietary equipment at a NAP facility; they share what’s called a “peering point’’ where the switching goes on — whether data, voice, internet traffic or video streaming. The closest thing to a layman’s explanation of the NAP’s capacity is that it can handle the equivalent of about 2 million average-sized e-mails every second.

There are only four other Tier 1 NAPs in the country. Three years ago, Finzi explains, the closest NAP was in Washington, D.C.; meanwhile, the national fiber-optic network ended in Atlanta: Send an e-mail from Tampa to Orlando, and it had to be routed out of state. Our peninsula was out of the way, irrelevant.

As Epik’s COO, Finzi had a proprietary interest in fully exploiting his company’s fiber-optic network south of Atlanta. But he looked beyond. Finzi saw the opportunity — through the NAP — to establish a focus that better connected the cities of south Florida with each other and connected the region with the Atlanta junction point. With the construction of (now six) major international communications cables coming ashore in south Florida, he believed a NAP could bundle the whole regional kit and caboodle and create a “center of the Americas” that plays to south Florida’s economic and cultural strengths. “It became obvious that Florida could be the center of action rather than out-of-the-way,’’ he says.

Finzi persuaded more than 100 companies, most of them competitors, to get together to fund the facility, which is owned and operated by Manny Medina’s Terremark Worldwide. “It was challenging at times,’’ Finzi says, but the various companies saw that “the potential for growth is so significant that it offsets’’ the competitive aspects. The companies see that “the size of the pie is more important than the share of pie” at this point. “Rational players find the right balance between competing and collaborating.”

Some 35 companies are now paying to operate facilities at the NAP of the Americas, which is beginning to function as the major interchange for traffic between Latin America and North America and will also route traffic to Africa and Europe. (A lower-tiered BellSouth NAP in south Florida and a planned NAP in Jacksonville will likely function as the equivalent of secondary, feeder airports to the NAP of the Americas hub.)

If it follows the precedent set by the nation’s four other Tier 1 NAPs, the NAP of the Americas is likely to seed a high-tech cluster around itself. “Telecom companies locate operations, then the headquarters brings in ancillary services. That’s an expectation we can reasonably have for its effect in Miami,’’ Finzi says.

Finzi’s NAP will also firmly tie a major portion of Florida’s high-tech future to its business relationships with South America. Chile, for example, is probably the most competitive telecom market in the world, Finzi says. That country, Argentina, Mexico and Brazil (“the dormant 800-pound gorilla”) amount to a “significant opportunity’’ because of their size and the presence of a sufficiently developed middle class, he says.

The NAP, of course, is a reminder again of the need to upgrade the state’s education system. In a state where the supply of talent is thin, the NAP will also play a role in making diversity even less a “social good” and more a business imperative. Being able to speak Spanish, Finzi says, “is probably already essential right now. And in the future, whoever decides not to develop a personal ability to interact with Latin cultures is doing so at his own risk. That part of the world will see a much higher average growth than many other parts. High growth means very large opportunity, and finding yourself unable to participate is not a good idea.”

Can Florida still retain a sense of identity in a high-tech world where the links go everywhere and people are defined by their communities of interest rather than their communities of residence, I asked Finzi, the father of two young children. “The more you can eliminate barriers, the more you strengthen the role of a society like Florida’s,” he says. “The more people are able to move in and out, the more ability you have to exchange services and products — you have diluted the boundaries but strengthened the core.” Pointing to the example of great cities like Hong Kong and New York, he repeats: “The thinner the boundaries, the stronger the core.’’

See September 21, 2001 issue of Florida Trend for original article.