Telehouse
More info
- Released
- 1990 (London Docklands)
- Owner
- KDDI
- Type
- Data centres and colocation
Japanese-owned data centre company whose Docklands buildings became one of Europe's most important meeting points for internet traffic.
Owned by Japan's KDDI, Telehouse opened its first London Docklands facility in 1990, originally pitched as disaster-recovery space for the City's financial firms. It turned into something else: once the London Internet Exchange, LINX, moved in, the networks followed, because the cheapest place to interconnect is wherever everyone else already is.
That mechanism — the network effect in bricks and mortar — is why colocation providers like Telehouse and Equinix are so hard to compete with. Anyone can build a data centre; nobody can build one that already has several hundred networks plugged in. Telehouse now runs sites in New York, Paris and Tokyo, among others.