Meet-me room

In a carrier hotel such as 60 Hudson Street in Manhattan or One Wilshire in Los Angeles, the meet-me room is where dozens, sometimes hundreds, of carriers place their termination gear and connect to one another through cross-connects. Fiber comes in from the street through manholes, rises through risers and converges there. It is convenient, and it is a concentration point that survey reports rarely describe well enough. A fire, a water leak or a power cut in that room takes connectivity away from every customer in the building, including those whose servers are untouched. The risk engineer therefore checks whether there are two meet-me rooms separated by a fire wall, fed by separate power chains, and whether fiber enters through two sides of the building. A single cable entry in the basement is enough to make the redundancy of everything else theoretical. On the insurance side, a loss at that spot triggers contingent business interruption for hundreds of insureds who have no idea which building their carrier runs through; accumulation is hard to trace for lack of data on who transits which room. One caveat: large exchange points and tier 1 carriers spread their points of presence across several buildings in the same metro, which often turns the event into degraded service rather than a clean outage.